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E GREAT POETS AND THEIR THEOLOGY 





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ime GREAT POETS 


AND 


Their Theology 


BY 
BUGUSTUS HOPKINS STRONG, D.D., LL.D. 


PRESIDENT OF THE ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


AUTHOR OF ‘“‘SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY” AND “‘ PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION” 


(Fifth Thousand) 


THE GRIFFITH & ROWLAND PRESS 
PHILADELPHIA 


BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS 
TORONTO, CAN. 


Copyright 1897 by the 
AMERICAN BaApTisT PUBLICATION SOCIETY 


From the Society’s own Press 


eer 


To My Wite | 





i: 





409874 





PREFACE 


THE essays which follow are summer recreations. 
The author is well aware that he does business on small 
capital, and that most of the capital is borrowed. He 
only hopes to repay what has been lent him, with the 
addition of some moderate interest. 

It is not maintained that the poets are conscious the- 
ologians. In their vocation as seers, however, they have 
glimpses of truth in theology, as well as in philosophy 
and physics. From their higher point of view, indeed, 
they sometimes descry truths which are yet below the 
horizon of other thinkers. Poetical expressions of 
these truths are all the more valuable, because they 
are clothed in the language of feeling, and appeal to 
our sense of beauty. 

The author is inclined to believe that the great poets, 
taken together, give united and harmonious testimony to 
the fundamental conceptions of natural religion, if not 
to those of the specifically Christian scheme. This 
testimony is cumulative, and it follows the law of evolu- 
tion, by advancing from vague to clear. Even poets 
like Goethe, who proclaim another gospel, witness in 
spite of themselves to the truth as it is in Jesus. 

There may be question what names deserve to be 
counted among those of the great poets. The author 
at first intended to include in the list only Homer, 
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Further study 


Vil 


Vill PREFACE 





has convinced him that Wordsworth, Goethe, Browning 
and Tennyson must be admitted to the company of thi 
immortals. | | 

Whatever judgment may be passed upon this point} 
he anticipates no dissent from the opinion that th 
study of all these poets is of the greatest advantage t« 
theologians and preachers, as well as to the genera! 
seeker after truth. With the hope that old truths may 
gain new interest and brightness from an unfamilia’ 
setting, the author submits to the public the fruits o| 
his vacation work for the past thirteen years. 

It remains only to be said that the first part of the 
paper on Browning was printed in “The Examiner,” o 
New York, in December, 1887; that on Milton, it 
“The Watchman,” of Boston, in March, 1897; thos¢ 
on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth 
have appeared in “The Standard,” of Chicago, at variou: 
dates from 1887 to 1897; those on Goethe and Tenny 
son, together with the latter part of that on Browning! 


appear now for the first time. 
Acie 


ROCHESTER, August I, 1897. 


CONTENTS 


HOMER 


Characterizations of the Homeric poems. . . . 
The critical, or disintegrating, theory . 
Reaction in favor of the unity . . . 


Painting in the background . 
Development of plot . 


Minor proofs of common eu nereNic ; 


Unity of the ‘‘Iliad’’. : 
Unity of the ‘‘Odyssey”’ . . 


Judgment of recent investigators . . 
The poems were probably written 


Testimony of Abou Symbel . 
Antiquity of Greek letters. 
Recent evidence from Egypt 


87. Si, ae Oe 


wee | Oe 


Were the Greeks a dull people? . . 
Composition and transmission possible without rate 


Later feats of memory 

The evolutionary theory 
There was a hearing public . 
Homer had his theology 
Undertone of monotheism 
Zeus amagnified man .. . 
Relation of Zeus to fate. 
The gods are not holy 

They instigate iniquity 

Origin of this conception . . 
Homer’s doctrine of sin . . 
Sin is deception . 


See 38 Oe fon) 6 


OMe re Pek a Le Sn 


Oo) at SO Oe re Fie) fe 


Ow Or. oe 6 6 Ue ee), Ce 


Pye Op 20) Ss pC te ot en a Ce 


Oe eet OMS, her ey e.M ie 


Aiea ewan bes 8 ee a! oS 


No deep penitence in Homer ; 


THE HOMERIC QUESTION AND THE HOMERIC THE- 
OLOGY 


Sa wm & 


ioe) 


10 
12 
13 
16 
16 
20 
21 
oy 
25 
27 
28 
30 
31 
31 
34 


37 
39 


4O 


4! 
42 
44 
44 
46 


x CONTENTS 


Vet sin is self-deception also".”. 2 Gh eure eee 
And sin deserves death’.” <5) 9m). eee ee 
Homer's doctrine of atonement? 2.97) ae eee 
Does:it involve substitutions “2 3.) .5 cm eee ee ee 
Old ‘Testament analogues. ir. apne eee 
Superiority of the Christianscheme ...... i 
Hschatolovyin Homers... reese Ay Fe certs ee ic 
Life incomplete without the body fis.9.) ~) swe 
Rewards and punishments ;\.. 5) ee ee : 
‘The human interest predominates\7 2) ae) 
splendor of the Homeric poetry =) 3 ea es 





VAR GIs 


THE POET OF THE “ROMAN EMPIRE. >). 


Virgil’s place in’history = .. 0). jars eee 
The poet a product of Ins ime 7) Gin ee 

His early surroundings 79.908 G5 sae ee 
His personal traits 05 3 ee : 

‘The education, of thespoet <-) =a eae 
Preéminently a literary artist, ie @ eee 
His relation to earlier Latin poetry (ea eae ee 
The greatest of imitators; : . |) 2 ee 

Progress-in his work =... 71 a. ae an ats 
The ‘*Eclogues** of, Virgil |; .s <2 ase 
The ‘‘Georgics ’’ of Virgil Me 

His ideas of nature and of government. ...... 
The ‘‘ Atneid’”’ of Virgil . es Sel oe 
His journey to Greece and: his deathamaaemaeen 2s aeens 
Virgil compared with Homer é 

Artistic rather than spontaneous . ....... 
The last half of the ‘* Aineid ’’ 

Virgil’s special merits eee 

The apotheosis of -Augustusmesaeee ne ee 
Virgil a precursor of modern Serien 

Virgil’s theological ideas 

The soul holds a higher place feat in Biomed 

Virgil a prophet of ‘Christianityaa se. ee o 

sources of ‘his predictions | 2a some 0 ee ee A aris 
Wide influence of / Virgil’s poctrguacs. se cued. ee ee 





CONTENTS xi 


Hed-{o/a\revival of the old religion”... ¢>.. 2... 98 


Mogtrdasasaint and a’wizatd {0c se wy ee 698 
Reavevaslecends about Virgil ae, wt awl. « cs «16,100 
srory.o1 the’salvation of Rome . .'.. ee a Ab OR 


Beroietie DOCl OLS NOME © artsy ome ieee ft Se 20d 


DANTE 


Mente AND THE DIVINE COMEDY... .. .« 1O§ 155 


pmaurmmer stidy-of) Dante | 4s. s¢¢eee oh e+ 107 
antec pirtn.and education. ear.) tinct ew ya 10S 











Dante and Beatrice .. . ina ole) gee LOG 
Preparation for the ‘‘ Divine Comedy SSS ae ears A 
Dante exile, 5 .°. wis 
The ‘‘ Divine Comedy ”’ enoiher ss Jeske, S Prone APLuLts 
Expresses Dante’s philosophy of civil Societys fe cu) 3) $17 
Expresses his ideas of man’s relations to God . . . . 119 
An interpretation of.all known truth. ...... .121 
monte soclieme of {hé-universé). 9. 2....5. 3). . « 821 
erative ci verse ana 1s\niluence Y ejge) oN es a oe 
Mresentrance to the, Well ms tt. vt, a ees 125 
Ppesnell/of incontinence 2. 1. Tk cs 4 S228 
Berertcll of bestiality: ssc a, 2 2 sts we) ete 120 
SPISBU CLAN TUSIICE: a Soe. leas es utc Phebe doe ee 1GO 
s Lessons of the ‘‘Inferno”’ . . a Re 
Sin is essentially vile and eaitenouble Gist ab ee eax sok 3x 
Saris self-perversion of the will», . . < 3.4.44 s° «133 
Penalty is not external to the simmer ©... 7... | 134 
Peermuell tOLDUTSALOLy 4) i ws ele ian tegete es aes 4 F390 
Sereeeeven CapMalesilisy x). 297 cc eak een awn 1G 908 30 
The seven terraces of the mount. . ......... 139 
Meesiic Ole theass Purgatorio.” . > Basu is, + 342 
Purgatory is not so much a place as a process . . . . 142 
Unwarrantably extends purification after death. . . . 143 
Regards the process of purification as a penal one . . 143 
fmemine spherés.o1 the *“Paradiso 7m vow... . . - 144 
The rose of the blessed. . . ... Baer ON ce FAS 
Light and love constitute Dante’s Hewvan ates oe ESE 


To Dante the spiritual world was the real world . . . 154 





Xi CONTENTS 
SHAKESPEARE 


THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE . . . . 157-228 


Mysterious largeness of Shakespeare. . . . . . . . 159 
The function of imagination... 32 2.04.) /)- 0.90100 
True art is creative... . PIM, TEMES 9 62) 
Poetry an expression of the unipereal® eal heb EOS 
Dramatic poetry the highest form of art. . . . . . . 164 
More of truth in poetry than in prose. . . . . . . . 167 
The abnormal use of imagination . ....... . 168 
Universality involves impersonality, . ..... . . 169 
Shakespeare partly the product of his time .... . 171 


Nafute as well-as nurture to) es ee eee ee 
A youth not wild and dissolute .. . eR ae bs 
The first two periods of his productive Bari ohare 
The last two periods of his productive activity. . . . 181 
Did Shakespeare appreciate his own genius? . . . . 183 
Concessions to the tastes of the vulgar . . . . . . . 185 
Meaning of the word universality ......... 186 
Character -manifested'....5-5-. sivogeu ee 
Character developed oy.) five. ce uee Bue oe 
Ethical and religious ideas. 2 5") ay 2 ets 
Neither naturalistic nor agnostic . . . ..... . . 195 
Man’s freedom and responsibility ........ . 197 
Crime is not the mere result of ignorance . . . . . . 198 
\Personal sins and hereditary sinfulness . . . . . . . 200 
Responsibility for inborn depravity... ... . . . 202 
Conscience predicts retribution ....... . . . 203 
Not only in the next world, but in this . . . . . . . 205 
The only real quittance is the work of Christ . . . . 208 
Shakespeare a witness to Christianity. . . . .. . . 209 
~ A creator of imagery as well as of character. . . . . 211 
The poetic diction of Shakespeare . . . ..... . 214 
The limitations of Shakespeare .....,... .217 


The greatest poet of secular humanity ..... . . 217 


MILTON 


THE POET OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 221-27 


Shakespeare and Milton . .). . 2. s/s 2 5 «© = « 223 











CONTENTS Xili 


The Miltonic sublimity. . ... mc she of PRE ALi | 
Intense personality of Milton’s Doe rie OT eS eye eae) 
RESERUSLOEC DUT ICY ore es) 5 vied: bm) Leas ian rh AP 226 
Pemiiiensce Crud aiwer rt tae ee es. cls se 228 
Bemrenoious faithwe treet wr ee. atc. yy 3220 
meepereuon. ol practical life PEt i. sr cha wae egk 
Milton’s parentage and training . . . oS Sat ean Soa sr 
He takes part in the struggle for treregn Rita e ee ao 
His pamphlets, their eloquence and their Gant 245 
Siiswercencss of denunciation ©... 2) 2). 7. 2.236 
His infelicitous marriage . . . eee ek 239 
His ‘‘ Doctrine and Discipline Be Dione ace te de Sykes pees: 
meeloses his sight (77 0)". Lea nee Seed 
Blindness shuts him in to the sueratnenn ene ge gearae CAS 
Scheme of the universe in the ‘‘ Paradise Lost’’ . . 246 
Temptation and fall of our first parents. . . . . . . 249 
ies Paradise’ Regained’? . .*. SN ey OT a yee rb 
Can the highest poetry be aiductio? ie Tayler sth gill 3 
Must poetry conform to correct science? . . . . . . 255 
Milton’s ‘‘ Treatise of Christian Doctrine”? . . . . . 257 
The Scriptures an infallible divine revelation. . . . . 258 
An Arminian doctrine of divine decrees . . . ... . 259 
An Arian doctrine of the person of Christ . . . . . 260 
A Monistic doctrine of creation . . . oe 208 
A Traducian doctrine of the origin of the ei reeo4 
An orthodox doctrine of anthropology and soteriology 265 
A doctrine of soul-sleeping in eschatology .. . . 266 
A Baptist doctrine of the church and the erinanee . 269 
mennal Ouaker élement in his religian ... .. . ... 270 
Influence of Roger Williams upon Milton .. . ... 271 
What is the essence of Protestantism? . . . Wee ie: 
Milton shows the creative power of true alee ee 70 
GOETHE 
MmeePOET OF PANTHEISM. . . . «3 . 279-331 
eather and Goethe compared . . 2 7 2)... . . . 281 
Goethe the literary emancipator of Gamay ee mh eae 
Cosmopolitan Frankfort, and Goethe’s parents . . . 283 
Attractiveness of young Goethe ......... . 285 


fernenmncapable of trucilove . f hae 60 ee | 207 


XIV 


THE 


CONTENTS 


Destitute of patriotism . 
Goethe’s early moral attitude 


Not short-sightedness or invincible ignorance . 


A wrong moral decision ' : 
He accepts the gospel of self- cure : 
Effect upon his philosophy 


Effect upon his theologyom a. <a. eens 


Goethe a non-ethical evolutionist 

Effect of pantheism upon his personal life 
An egotistic and lonely old age 

Effect of pantheism upon his literary ee 
Lost his power to depict reality . 

From Gothic warmth to classic coldness 
The first part of ‘‘ Faust ”’ 


Expresses truths of freedom, sin, anit peatentiod ‘ 


The second part of ‘‘Faust”’ . 


A pantheistic substitute for the Giectisn rederpligh 


Concessions to Christianity only apparent . 


Goethe’s God is indistinguishable from nature . 


Goethe the poet of a materialistic age . 
In his lyrics he most nearly forgets himself 
Pernicious influence of his philosophy 


In matters of faith the enslaver of his country. . . 


WORDSWORTH 


POET OF NATURE 


Characterizations of Wordsworth 


His relation to preceding thought .92 .9. . . . 


His account of his own growth 
Meditation upon nature . 

He sought truth more than peaunee 
The true poet must ennoble character 


Wordsworth the poet of natural religion . . . . 


Not inconsistent with Christianity 

The influence of his sister Dorothy 
Dorothy the complement of her brother 
The influence of Coleridge . 

The breaking of their intimacy 


The ‘‘Intimations of _Immortality’’:...... 


. 290 
. 290 
. 292 
. 293 
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CONTENTS XV 


peemimeo recollections of the, past 0). "6b 2 3354 
| Recollections of preéxistence in God... .... . 357 
ieacination is creative reason’:f5).; 2 0. f G'?. 360 
An organ for the recognition of truth ..... . . 361 
eetimtern Abbey’”™ °. 2°. . | ei 363 
Nature an instructor, becuse? instinct ais Gen Eee aae ee) 
: mine ‘<Ode'to'\Duty?® '. . : Py E3060 
Conscience an eternal witness pest dantheisnd Se a, 
i Wordsworth’s poetry essentially Christian, . . . . . 368 
| Final recognition of Wordsworth’s claims. . . . . . 369 
| He has addeda permanent element to the world’s 
EDOUCUL MAW oN Fy damage, eins alle amen Many, 371 
BROWNING 


MEEEOETRY ANDO HIS THEOLOGY ... . . «+ . 373-447 


Browning’s portrait in the Watts’ Collection. . . . . 373 





Bresstory ofy Drown gs) Wied Sree hs bend Vee S77 
‘Phe creative element'in poetry . . 2... .. . .378 
The imaginative reproduction of the universe . . . . 380 
Browning the poet, not of nature, but of man’s thoughts 381 
Not lyric, but dramatic. . . . 8 Cue ate WP 
The structure of ‘‘ The Ring et te Book errata. 305 
(Poe ideal:element in poetry. 5 4,2 . 3 . A 2 387 
Poetry not a mere representation of He ee 300 
The poet must believe in freedom and immortality . . 390 
In the personality, righteousness, and love of God . . 392 
In a revelation of God toman. . . tit et eh SOA. 
) Browning’s spirit more religious than irennyaore $7099) A090 
ments poetry always Serious? sm el ws Gn 6 OOF 
Is his poetry always healthful? ........ . «398 
mne-artisiic clement in poetry . . |.) 4 wa. . % » 2,400 
An explanation of Browning’s obscurity . .. . . . 402 
Is the explanation sufficient? . .. . . 404 
Has he the art of rhythmical and cncteal eri reaionts ? 407 
Palliations of the poet’s harshness . . ..... . . 410 
The highest poetry is yet tocome ........ . 412 
Browning as the poet of optimism . . . . .... . 413 


Due to health, environment, philosophical ar uence 414 
He finds God, not only in nature, but in the soul. . . 416 


XVI CONTENTS 


Interprets nature by man, not man by nature . . . . 419 
Browning is a monist, but not a pantheist. . . . . . 422 
The unifying principle is love . . . °° . 426 


An optimist, because he sees God ies in fe Christ . 427 
The later Browning a philosopher rather than a poet . 431 
He holds moral evil to be somehow a form of good . 434 
Right and wrong are illusions to sting men to effort . 436 
Love is of God, as truth and right arenot .... . 439 
A sad falling off from the earlier Browning . . .. . 442 
Yet he sees in love a guarantee for immortality . . . 444 


TENNYSON 


POETRY AS INTERPRETING THE DIVINE ORDER 449-524 


‘The poets early surroundings...) eae oe era 
His *conceptionyor poelr ye een. ire cee tae en eee 453 
‘Thetrae poctisiaspropnet also jc 4 to. ur eee 455 
Tennyson’s relation to preceding poets . . . . . . . 458 
Vhe. first:period of daimtyprace.3". ih) «a ele ee oO 
The poet’s replies to his critics ., .. . . het hia 
His: personal characteristics) 0. yeas. 1 . 462 
The second period of subtle thought. . . ... . . 464 
The divine order in the relation of the sexes . . . . 465 
Illustrated in ‘‘The Princess’? . . es Emer OF, 
The divine order in society and sovertient “ides 4Zo 
Illustrated in ‘* Locksley Hall’’ and other poems . . 470 
The divine order in the relation of man to God . . . 473 
Illustrated in ‘‘In Memoriam’”’ . . - 473 
‘*In Memoriam ”’ is Tennyson’s ‘‘ Paice Reaaines ”? 476 
‘The third period of ‘broad humanity) 27). see 77 
Illustrated in ‘‘ The Idylls of the King”’ . . Sore 18, 
‘¢The Idylls of the King”’ is his ‘‘ Paradise Lost” Ree: 
Manis anined ‘by one sin. | ala eee ee ek 
The’ dramas, ** Harold;’’ \** Becket, ;and ‘“OQueen 
Maryiaaeeere . 482 
His thantoes Mivenced i aigieh peat philecone 483 
Faith wrongly sundered from knowledge . . . . . . 484 
The soul is an emanation from God ........ 486 
Yet Tennyson is no pantheist . . . . of A Oo 


The soul’s personality persists after Acathe yee toe Ay ye 


CONTENTS 


Had the soul a personal existence before birth? . 
The poet’s conception of nature . 

The world is a shadow-world . ; 
Tennyson an evolutionist, but not a acratet 
Sin as sensuality, in ‘‘ The Vision of Sin”’ . 

Sin as pride and selfishness, in ‘*‘ The Palace of Art? “2 
Christ recognized as divine Redeemer 

God’s work must be complemented by man’s 
The fourth period of growing despondency 
Tennyson’s restorationism . 

Summing up of Tennyson’s Eeoloey | 

The greatest poetry must be theological 


- 493 
. 496 
- 499 
. 502 
. 504 
. 506 
. 509 
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. 519 
- 519 
. 522 


XV 


» 








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i) 


HOMER 


‘HE HOMERIC QUESTION AND THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 
| 


I 


_ Homer’s “Iliad” has been called “the most famous 
mong poems.” Bryant speaks of its author as “the 
reatest of epic poets,’ and says that “the common 
onsent of the civilized world places the ‘Iliad’ and the 
Odyssey’ at an unapproachable height of poetical ex- 
lence.’ Shelley declares that “as a poet, Homer 
lust be acknowledged to excel Shakespeare in the 
uth, the harmony, the sustained grandeur, the satis- 
ring completeness of his images.” Keats, ignorant of 
reek, looks into Chapman’s translation and describes 
is impressions in one of the finest of English sonnets: 


Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken ; 

Or like stout Cortez—when with eagle eyes 
He stared on the Pacific, and all his men 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise— 
Silent upon a peak in Darien, 


Cuique in sua arte credendum—we may trust the 

pets in matters pertaining to their own art. And the 

dpular verdict bears out that of the poets. Homer is 

‘anslated into every tongue that makes pretension to 

civilized. The rector of the German Gymnasium 
2 


4 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


tells his pupils that there are two things which they are 
expected to learn thoroughly : the first is the Bible, and 
the second is Homer. He speaks wisely, for these aré 
the two great records of the early world ; Homer gives 
us the secular record, as the Bible gives us the sacred. 

Matthew Arnold has summed up for us the general 
characteristics of Homer’s poetry. He makes them te 
be: first, rapidity of movement ; secondly, plainness 0: 
thought; thirdly, simplicity of expression ; fourthly, no 
bility. Ballad poetry lacks the last of these—-nobility 
As the writer of the article in the “Britannica” hai 
said: “The old English balladist can stir Sir Phily 
Sidney’s heart like a trumpet ; but Homer can do mor 
he can refine and transmute the raw natural man. 
Virgil, Dante, Milton, lack the first three of the element 
of Homer’s greatness—rapidity, plainness, simplicity 
They seem artificial and self-conscious beside Homet 
Virgil has always for his underlying motive the exalte 
tion of Rome; Dante is bent upon expounding the polit 
cal and religious philosophy of his time; even Milton,1 
the “Paradise Lost,” is the Arian and the Puritan. Bt 
Homer seems free from subjective motive. No strom 
antipathy of race or of religion moves him. He is hin 
self absorbed, and he absorbs us, in life. Like Shake: 
peare and Browning, he can say: Humani nihil an 
alienum puto—everything human delights me. Wit 
wonderful ease and simplicity he depicts to us, in nob 
metrical form, the whole world of human action ar 
feeling. 

Homer reigns by right of possession, and both th 
poets and the people recognize his authority. But tl 
critics are a peculiar race, and for a century past the 





| THE CRITICAL THEORY Ng 


\ave been suggesting serious doubts whether the “ Iliad” 
nd the “ Odyssey” are by the same author; whether 
ither one was as a whole composed by Homer ; whether 
a fact such a man as Homer ever lived at all. Before we 
‘ttempt to form a judgment for ourselves, it may be 
vell to have before us a brief sketch of the history of 
vhat is known as “the Homeric Question.” 

| Antiquity has often been called uncritical. Yet an- 
iquity was critical enough to separate the “Iliad” and 
he “‘Odyssey’’ from the other so-called Homeric pro- 
luctions, and to recognize these two as the genuine 
vork of Homer, while it attributed the Hymns and the 
vyclic poems to other authors. There were but two 
xceptions to the unanimity of this judgment. About 
he year 225 B. c., Xeno and Hellanicus of Alexandria 
letached the “Iliad” from the “ Odyssey,” and held to 
_dual authorship. For this reason these two otherwise 
ibscure Alexandrian writers were called Chorizontes, or 
separatists. They never went so far as to suggest that 
he “Iliad”’ might be a congeries of poems by different 
uthors, or that the “ Odyssey’ was a composite produc- 
ion. That was left for the skepticism of a far later 
ime. 3 

_ The close of the last century was an era of disintegra- 
ion, of revolt against settled beliefs and institutions. 
(Then “a man was famous, according as he lifted up 
\ixes upon the thick trees.” Wolf, in Germany, pub- 
ished his “ Prolegomenato Homer” in 1795. He held 
hhat the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, about the middle 
vf the sixth century B. c., finding current in his time 
nany separate and independent lays which had for their 
‘ommon subject the siege of Troy, compiled these into 








re 


ee ee 


6 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 
¥ 


one poem and first committed them to writing. Wolf, 
however, regarded the nucleus of the “Iliad” and the 
nucleus of the “ Odyssey” as composed by Homer, or 
by two Homers—to this nucleus in each case Peisistratus 
added other lays. q 
Thus the long tradition of single and Homeric author: 
ship was broken, and one modern critic set at naught a 
belief which, with two unimportant exceptions, had been 
held semper, ubique, et ab omnibus. The breaking of 
the dam was followed bya flood of destructive criticism, 
The German Lachmann resolved the “ Iliad” into sixteen 
distinct and clearly defined lays. Grote, in England, 
considered it as an Achilleid enlarged into an “ Iliad™ 
by the addition of nearly half the poem—the “ Odyssey” | 
being a later production by a different author. Still more 
recently, Paley has maintained the same view, and has 
compared the two poems to pictures of stained class, 
made up by an artistic combination of handsome bits of 
older windows which fortune and time had shivered. 
We are fortunately able to set over against the names 
of these great critics another set of names, at least 
equally great, of men who, in spite of all the learning 
brought to bear in dismembering the Homeric poems; 
still defend their substantial integrity. It is the moreé 
interesting to observe that some of these defenders were 
at one time persuaded to adopt the views of Wolf anc 
Lachmann. Goethe was one of these. He gave up 
at first the unity of the Homeric authorship; but after 
ward his juster poetical insight asserted itself and he set 
himself to oppose the critical theory. So it was with 
Nitzsch, though he continued to believe in large inter 
polations and additions to the primitive poems. Mure 





| 


| REACTION IN FAVOR OF THE UNITY 7 


a like manner, was first a Wolfian; but after twenty 
ears of study he reversed his judgment and became a 
ealous advocate of the unity. 

_ Gladstone also defends the Homeric authorship, and 
rings to the defense what the learned Germans so 
ften lack—a statesmanlike common sense. The latest 
ontribution to the discussion is the article of Monro in 
he last edition of the “ Encyclopzedia Britannica,” and. 
his too holds to the unity of each poem, though the 
writer regards the “‘ Odyssey” as composed by a differ- 
mt and later author than the “ Iliad.” So the combat- 
nts are as to numbers pretty evenly balanced, while 
‘enius and learning, though at one time they seemed 
qainly to favor the theory of disintegration, are of late 
aore and more arraying themselves on the side of the 
traditionai view that both poems are substantially by the 
ame author and that this author is Homer. 

} But it is desirable that we should look into the matter 
or ourselves. Let us briefly review the critical theory, 
ind in reviewing it let us reverse the common order of 
liscussion. I ask the reader to adjourn for a little the 
‘uestion whether the “Iliad” and the “‘Odyssey”’ are 
ach a unity, and, granting this for the sake of the 
irgument, I ask him first to consider with me whether 
hese two are works of the same author. There is 
‘bundant evidence, as it seems to me, why this latter 
juestion should be answered in the affirmative: the 
‘lliad”” and the “ Odyssey” are by the same hand. I 
rgue this mainly upon the ground that the two poems 
‘xhibit a similarity of structure impossible to explain in 
‘ny other way, especially when we take into account 
he fact that this peculiar structure is found only here 








8 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


in all classic literature, and that it is at the same time 
characteristic of the highest genius. 

Jevons, in his admirable “ History of Greek Litera 
ture,” has pointed out that Homer’s method of “ paint 
ing in his background”’ is entirely unique yet incom 
parably artistic. The test of a poet’s ability is hi 
method of putting his hearer or reader in possession 0, 
the preliminary facts needful to the understanding 0 
the action. There are three ways of doing this. Euripi 
des is an illustration of the first: one of his character 
appears upon the stage and describes the situatior 
before the play opens; but this method forewarns the 
hearer or reader that the play is not reality, whereas the 
poet’s object is so to absorb his audience that they wil 
for the hour regard the performance not as illusion bu 
as real life. Virgil gives us an instance of the secont 
method : the hero of the “ Atneid”’ relates the preceding 
history to Dido; but here the speaker is too evidenth 
talking not so much to Dido as to the reader, and st 
again the illusion is dispelled. The third method is tha 
of constructing scenes necessary to the development 0 
the plot, and yet, in the midst of the forward movement 
making these very scenes explain what is behind. Thi 
is reality ; this is the highest art ; and this is the methoe 
of Homer. 

Observe how all that is presupposed in the action 0} 
the “Iliad” is disclosed by the plot itself. The action 
lasts only some forty or fifty days. But these forty 0 
fifty days have been preceded by nine long years 0 
siege, during which the Greeks have shut up ther 
enemy in Troy and have occupied themselves in rava) 
ging the surrounding country. Some knowledge of al. 






| 


| PAINTING IN THE BACKGROUND 9 


his must be communicated, but only incidentally. The 
yoem begins with the quarrel between Achilles and 
\gamemnon. It is the father of Briseis, the subject 
f£ the quarrel, from whom we learn that these chiefs 
re beleaguering Troy. Why, we learn from Achilles, 
vhen he says that it is for no advantage of his own, but 
0 gain recompense for Menelaus and Agamemnon. 
Tow long the siege has continued, we learn from 
\gamemnon, when he tests the spirit of his men after 
he defection of Achilles. Just before the first engage- 
nent, Hector upbraids Paris with the remark: “Thou 
aayst see what sort of a warrior he is whose lovely wife 
hou hast.” Paris is vanquished and flees to his mis- 
ress. Then first the guilty cause of the Trojan war 
ppears in the person of Helen. 

In precisely similar manner does the author of the 
'Odyssey ”’ paint in the background of his story. The 
irst four books are called the Telemacheia, and they 
‘epict the state of things which precedes the action of 
he poem. Telemachus, the youthful son of Odysseus, 
3 set before us as suffering continual wrong. The inso- 
ence of the suitors for the hand of his mother is shown 
ly bringing in Athene, a candid judge, in the guise of a 
tranger. Hoping to win the mother, the suitors even 
lot the death of the son. Thus, at the beginning, the 
ong distress of twenty years is unfolded before us, yet 
‘ll by way of incident and as a part of the plot itself. 
“he news about Odysseus, vague at first, becomes more 
efinite, till it stops just where the real action of the 
Odyssey” begins. When Telemachus has set sail for 
’ylos the preparations are complete, and we enter upon 
ne narrative of Odysseus’ wanderings and of his return. 





1O THE HOMERIC QUESTION 






























Now I submit that this similarity of structure goes f va 
to prove the two poems the work of one author. Here; 
are intuitive discernment of a law of literary composition 
and successful working in accordance with it which 
evince the highest genius. That two great poets shoul 
have arisen simultaneously in that early age, and that! 
both should have constructed their poems so completely 
in accordance with this law of the human mind, this law 
of human thought, that later writers can imitate but 
never surpass them, this surely is a far greater demand| 
upon our believing faculty than is the hypothesis of one 
author for them both. 4 

This conviction will be strengthened by considering 
the development of the plot in the two poems, as we 
have now considered the preparation for it. We must 
remember that the epic appeals to wonder, just as the 
drama does. After the situation is set before us, there 
must come an entanglement which rouses our curiosi y 
The more complex the plot, so long as it is not com} 
fused, the more difficult the knot, so long as its intr 
cacies can be seen, so much the greater is the interes! 
which is raised in the reader, so much more intense i 
his demand for the déxouement, the untying, the resolu 
tion of the theme. We have seen with what art tk 
“Tliad” and the “Odyssey” propose their subjects | 
us—the concrete before the abstract, synthesis befor 
analysis, the problem before the explanation. Do the 
also show a common genius and follow a common prit 
ciple in the evolution of their respective plots ? 

The full answer to this question would require al 
elaborate statement of the argument of each. This: i 
obviously impracticable in the present essay. I mus 






















| DEVELOPMENT OF PLOT If 


mtent myself with citing a few of the curious corre- 
yondences of the two poems. In the “Iliad,” Achilles 
j absent from the end of the first book to the beginning 
the eighteenth—so in the « Odyssey,” Odysseus is 
ysent most of the time. In both the “Iliad” and the 
Odyssey,’ matters grow from bad to worse. In the 
Iliad,” the Greeks suffer untold woes, although they 
we for nine years confined the enemy within the walls 
Troy. Achilles’ absence now enables the Trojans to 
ive them behind the rampart they have been forced 
. build, and even to fire their ships; then Achilles 
mes forth to avenge Patroclus, the tide of battle turns, 
id the hero carries death and dismay before him. 

(So, in the “Odyssey,” the servants and suitors crow 
ckless of duty and fearless of punishment—successive 
itrages intensifying our indignation—until the many- 
led Odysseus, after enduring incomparable toils and 
ngers, appears upon the scene, proves his might by 
inging his ancient bow, and from it rains upon the 
‘ilty crew the shafts of a just retribution. In both the 
‘liad’ and the “ Odyssey,” the plot leads step by step 
ja crisis of moral grandeur; in both poems this climax 
‘followed by soothing scenes which relieve the long 
rain upon the feelings of the reader. We claim that 
€ poems are too much alike in this great matter of 
‘ucture to have been by different authors. Imitation 
ll not account for the similarity ; if it were so, we should 
e “Tliads’’ and “Odysseys” in plenty through the 
er ages. No, this secret of structure is an instinct of 
ius ; it works spontaneously and unconsciously in the 
eat artist ; only in later times does philosophic analysis 
netrate and name the mystery. 


i 
: 
| 
: 


12 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


The argument from structure is so conclusive that w 
can afford to leave unnoticed many other evidences of 
common authorship, such as the facts that each poer 
begins with an invocation to the Muse, and that at leas 
two thousand lines of the “Iliad” are found also in thi 
“Odyssey.” We need only mention some of the objet 
tions to the view that one poet composed both poem 
Minstrels appear in the “Odyssey,” it is said, but nevi 
in the “Tliad”; we reply that minstrels belong to tk 
court and not to the camp. The gods, it is said, are | 
bitterer warfare with each other in the “Iliad” than 1 
the “Odyssey”; yes, we answer, but in the “ Iliad| 
there are greater strifes among men to call forth the) 
anger. 

There are differences of style and spirit between th 
poems, but these differences are perfectly consiste! 
with unity of authorship when we remember two thing! 
first, that the “Odyssey” is a sequel to the “ Iliad 
depicting the subsequent fortunes of the heroes i 
Ilium, and having its scene in European Greece ail 
the Ionian Isles, as the scene of the “Iliad” was | 
Asiatic Greece and the Isles of the Atgean ; second| 
that the “Iliad” is the work of the author's youth, wh: 
the “Odyssey” is the production of his later ag 
Hence the hero of the first is a youthful warrior, t; 
hero of the second an older wanderer; hence the et. 
graphical knowledge of the second is more extend! 
than that of the first; hence the gods, in both poems 
medley of vices and virtues, are on the whole more soll 
and moral in the “ Odyssey” than in the “Iliad,” as bet: 
the more mature reflection of the author. The diff? 
ences between the two peems are not greater than the 





| UNITY OF THE “ILIAD” 13 
‘between the “Paradise Lost” and the “Paradise Re- 
gained” of John Milton, or, to take more modern in- 
“stances, between the earlier and the later writings of 
George William Curtis or Thomas Carlyle. 
_ But my learned readers are by this time fancying that 
[have been choosing an easy controversy with a man of 
‘straw, while the real antagonist has been unattacked and 
“unchallenged. I proceed, therefore, to discuss the more 
‘important question whether the “Iliad” or the “ Odys- 
sey” is in itself a unity. Was either poem the work of a 
‘single author, or are both the products of a gradual 
evolution, remains of a varied collection of hymns on the 
“war of Troy and the after adventures of its heroes? Was 
there one Homer who composed these great epics, or are 
the poems we now possess a skillful combination of 
‘many ancient heroic lays? Is the present unity, or 
‘seeming unity, of each poem due to the genius of one 
‘great poet who struck out the plan of the whole at the 
‘first, or is it due to critical selection and careful com- 
pilation i in subsequent ages? For the consideration of 
‘these questions I trust that what has been already said 
has prepared the way and has indicated the method. I 
would still call attention to structure, and would maintain 
that in the structure of each poem there are evidences 
of unity so marked and admirable that they point indu- 
bitably, not to many authors, but to one. 
_ The unity of the “Iliad” has sometimes failed to be 
perceived for the reason that the critic has mistaken the 
\theme of the epic. That theme is not the fall of Troy 
Nor the fate of Achilles; for neither of these is described 
inthe poem. In the first line of the first book we are 
|forewarned against such misapprehensions, when the 





14 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


subject announced is Achilles’ wrath. The first boo) 
crowded with incident as it is, yet with scarcely a sing 
simile, sets before us the cause of this wrath and tl 
promise of Zeus to avenge the son of Thetis. It 
only the death of the Trojan hero at Achilles’ hang 
that sates this wrath, and therefore the climax of tl 
poem is the slaying of Hector. All that follows afti 
this is simply the letting down of the reader’s excite 
feeling, and the poem ends with the line: “ Such buri 
the illustrious Hector found,” simply because the reade 
without this knowledge, would have been left in painf| 
anxiety. To this death of Hector, the sacrifice th) 
appeases Achilles’ wrath, the “TIliad’’ moves forwai 
and onward from the very start. The reverses of th 
Greeks and the transient successes of Odysseus ar, 
Diomede, both and alike prepare the way for the day | 
reckoning when the son of Peleus comes to his ow 
once more. . | 

And yet with this note of triumph there ever mingli 
a sorrowful minor strain. The hero of the Greeks wi 
the object of sympathy as well as of admiration. A 
evil fate hung over him. ‘Whom the gods love di 
young.” Though the death of Achilles does not for 
the proper subject of the poem, it is yet intimaté 
prophetically. When, in the first book, the hero appea} 
to Thetis, it is with a reference to his “ brief span of life) 
In the ninth book again he says: “My returning hon} 
is taken from me.” In the eighteenth, Thetis, sheddit 
tears, admonishes him: “Straightway, after Hectc 
death is appointed for thee.” In the nineteenth, ¥i 
hear Achilles yet again: “Well know I that it is a 
pointed me to perish here, far from my father dear ar! 





| UNITY OF THE “ILIAD” 15 


mother.” In the twenty-first: “Under the wall of 
‘Troy I must die by the swift arrows of Apollo.” And, 
finally, in the twenty-second book, Hector, with his 
dying breath, predicts the death of his fierce enemy; 
“In the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo slay thee, 
for all thy valor, at the Sczean gate.” Here in the suc- 
cessive books of the “Iliad” is the gradual unfolding of 
aprophecy. It reminds us of the far nobler progress in 
the Old Testament from the protevangelium in Genesis 
to the clear predictions in Micah and Isaiah. It has 
been well said that funeral notes mark every appearance 
.of Achilles, and that they grow in intensity with every 
repetition, like a motif of Wagner’s. 

_ Now all this is indicative of an underlying design—a 
design which belonged to the first conception of the 
poem. It cannot be an afterthought, for it is part of the 
very warp and woof of the “Iliad.” As each feature of 
a great picture must be in the artist’s mind before he 
puts his brush to canvas, so the ideas of Achilles’ wrath 
and of his fateful triumph must have been from the first 
in the mind of some composer of the “Iliad.” Ina true 
sense the whole antedates the parts, not the parts the 
Whole. Each subsequent part presupposes the parts 
that have gone before and is unintelligible without them. 
_ This is markedly true of that very portion of the poem 
which has been often held to be a mere episode—the 
Doloneia, or the episode in which Odysseus and Diomede 
made their brilliant night foray upon the camp of the 
i When we remember that this follows upon 
Achilles’ rejection of Agamemnon’s embassy and offer 
of reconciliation, and especially when we remember that 
jt lifts the Greeks from profound discouragement and 











16 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


prepares the way for the new onset which brings th 
whole story to its culmination, it will be plain to us tha 
the development of the plot makes indispensable th 
Doloneia. And so with every other extended passag 
which the critics have sought to detach. The whol 
“Tliad’”’ is an Achilleid, and it is vain to seek within th 
poem for any nucleus which has unity in itself and t 
which other short productions were added to make u 
the present whole. Even Wolf never dared to specif 
what the precise nucleus is. Try to separate any suc 
part from the rest, and you find such a network of mi 
tual reference that you are compelled to stop; there a1 
multitudinous connections, like bloodvessels, which pri 
vent you from cutting off any single limb without d 
stroying the life of the whole. 

If the unity of the “Iliad” is demonstrable, that ¢ 
the “Odyssey” is much more so. Indeed, I do not pri 
pose to enter into the detailed proof of it. I prefer | 
shorten my discussion by adopting as my own the co: 
clusion of Monro, the latest writer on the subject, whe 
he says: “The unity of the ‘Odyssey,’ as a whole, | 
beyond the reach of existing weapons of criticism.” 1] 
both poems, besides this matter of structure to which 
have adverted, there is a consistent delineation of cha 
acter, which sets before us the greatest variety of go 
and men, yet with never a slip or mistake in the way » 
confounding the traits of one with the traits of another- 
each character preserves his peculiar identity whenev 
and under whatever circumstances he appears. The 
is a composite language—the archaic Ionian is mix¢ 
with the later and less flowing speech, leaving it flexib 
enough for purposes of adaptation, yet like the tong 





UNITY OF THE ‘ ODYSSEY”’ 17 


of Chaucer marking a period of transition and incapable 
‘of reproduction at any later time. There is a dignity 
'of style which belongs only to the work of a lofty mind; 
| the adjective “ Homeric” has a meaning as well deaned 
jas the adjective “ Miltonic.” Like every one of the 
igreatest poets, the author of the “Iliad” and of the 
' Odyssey” is master of all the knowledge of his time, 
| and this conscious mastery breathes everywhere through 
this verse—dncedit regina. 1 suppose it was the con- 
vergence of all these proofs which moved Aristotle— 
lone of the most sagacious thinkers the world has seen 
i—to declare that the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” con- 
stitute the standard of epic unity. 

) Consider, fora moment, what demands the opposite 
1ypothesis makes upon our credulity. Instead of one 
i;domer, or even of two Homers, we are to believe in 
jnany Homers, each equal to the production of a poem 
iwhich may ultimately constitute a part of the “Iliad” 
pr the “Odyssey.” Are great poets, then, so plenty in 
‘uman history? The critics seem to think them thick as 
»lackberries in August. But even the Elizabethan age 
}ias but one Shakespeare ; we may count ourselves well 
ff if one such star of poesy rises in each five hundred 
years. Granting that a whole galaxy of poets rose at 
nce, is it probable that they would all choose for their 
heme the war of Troy, the last year of that war, 
Achilles among all the chiefs, and, more narrowly still, 
he one incident of Achilles’ wrath? Would they all, 
yith one accord, ignore the story of Troy’s fall, and 
i... over the fates of all the other heroes, devote 
heir genius to depicting only the wanderings and the 
jeturn of Ulysses? 








18 7 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 












Or, if this is credible, can we believe that out of the} 
independent lays a consistent whole could be constructe| 
with parts so nicely balanced, and with such unity [ 
effect as to make it a paragon of art? As well belie} 
that the Parthenon is the work of a multitude of sucet 
sive builders, each beginning where the last left off, bi 
without architect or plan: the rambling incongruitis 
and incompleteness of some English cathedrals show ¢: 
results of such a method. Or is the genius of the poe 
the genius of the patient bookmaker—some critical a] 
selecting and combining Peisistratus, or servant i 
Peisistratus, five hundred years after the original co} 
position of the separate lays? Then we have a doule 
problem to deal with: first, why such genius shot! 
have occupied itself with work so mechanical al 
inglorious; and secondly, why the composer of the 1 
cleus should not have been equally competent at ff 
first to organize his material into the finished poél 
Whatever proves such genius in the separate pati 
proves ability to construct the whole; whatever prors 
genius in the compiler proves that compiling wott 
never satisfy his poetical ambition. 

Professor Mahaffy, in his “ Problems of Greek Ei 
tory,” has well said that, while the “Iliad” and “oll 
sey” are made up of many different legends, their co-oti 
nation is the work of one great poet. Even the or, 
German critic of Homer calls the “Iliad” “the Gre 
Bible.” Yet he denies the unity of its authorship, é€ 
would break it into its component parts. He represe} 
the innovating and destructive tendency of the modi 
criticism in general. Now that the same method is } 
plied to the Hebrew Bible, and only the nucleus of i 


| UNITY OF THE “ODYSSEY” ~ 19 
| Pentateuch is accepted as the work of Moses, we can 
“see somewhat more clearly both the nature of the 
‘method and its results, 

It would rob us of every great name of literature. It 
would give to the late and inferior talent which can only 
patch together the works of others the praise that be- 
longs to supreme creative genius. The large design and 
‘simple elegance of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are 
‘not the natural product of an artificial age like that of 
Peisistratus ; they belong to the mighty childhood of the 
race. Moses and Homer were possibly added to and 
supplemented as their work passed down through gen- 
erations following ; Ezra in the former case and Peisis- 
tratus in the latter had doubtless a part to play in 
determining what was canonical and genuine. The 
“Tliad” and the « Odyssey” probably supplanted other 
and earlier poems which ceased to be read or recited 
and so were lost forever. But the former supplanted 
the latter because the former possessed a unity and 
majesty in which the latter were lacking. 

It was a case of the survival of the fittest. Homer 
himself, granting that our doctrine of a single author- 
ship is correct, may have taken many years for the com- 
plete elaboration of his poems, and during those years 
versions of various degrees of perfection may have been 
set in circulation. Some such hypothesis fully accounts 
‘or ancient diversities of reading and provides abundant 
work for Peisistratus, while it saves the integrity of the 
_ Goethe, in one of his letters to Schiller, cites 
ifferent versions of his own poems to refute the theory 
ve are considering. He had at various times amended 
md enlarged them, but he did not propose on that 


20 "THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


account to concede that there was a second Goethe, ' 
many Goethes. Wolf’s “ Prolegomena” itself, treated 
this way, would furnish evidence that the one Wolf w, 
many Wolfs instead. “The London Spectator” sur 
up the argument none too forcibly when it says: “ It 
as impossible that a first-rate poem or work of art shou 
be produced without a great master-mind to conceive t! 
whole, as that a cite living bull should be developed 0 
of beef sausages.” 

Here we must consider a most plausible ae 
proposed by Paley, the latest English representative 
the Wolfian theory. He denies the original unity 
the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” upon the ground th 
it is impossible to preserve intact so long poems U 
written, and that written they could not have been. i 
us take these two points in the reverse order from tk 
in which they are stated. Both assertions are witho 
warrant. We meet the first with the counter-asserti 
that the poems could have been, and probably we 
written. All arguments for the unity and the intert 
vital connections of the poems are also arguments | 
the writing of them. The burden of proof rests up 
those who deny that they were originally written, a 
the proof of such a negative as this will be found a ve 
considerable burden. | 

We do not choose, however, to avail ourselves of ¢ 
privilege in this matter. We rather desire to state 
the important facts which make against our own vi€ 
as well as those which favor it; let the balance then 
struck, and let the reader decide for himself. What v 
the date of Homer? or, if any dislike to put the questi 
in that form, when was the substance of the “ Ilia 





| TESTIMONY OF ABOU SYMBEL 21 


} and of the « Odyssey” composed? We answer, Homer 
i lived, or the poems were composed, many years after the 
_ Trojan war. This we infer from the fact that the poet 
: peaks of the superior size and strength of the warriors 
| who fought before Troy, as of a generation long since 
1 passed away. If then we take 1050 B. c,, the traditional 
| date of the Trojan war, as approximately correct, we 
) may put Homer, or the rise of the Homeric poems, at 
850 B. c., or four hundred years before the time of Her- 
i odotus. The question before us is therefore this: Is it 
| probable that the Greek language was committed to 
/ writing and was used for literary purposes so early as 
1 $50 B. C.? 
We must grant that no actual literary remains, unless 
it be the poems of Homer, have come down to us from 
! that time. The earliest specimens of Greek epigraphy 
H do not antedate the middle of the seventh century before 
| Christ. The fragmentary inscriptions of Thera, of 
Crete, and of Naucratis, may be assigned to 650, 640, 
and 630, respectively. Those of Melos and of Abou 
Symbel come later still, and probably within the sixth 
century. AAs the last of these is peculiarly interesting 
_and significant, I dwell upon it at greater length. 

Far up the river Nile, in modern Nubia, and at the 
very confines of ancient Egypt, still stand the remains 
_of the temple of Abou Symbel. On its front is the 
famous row of colossal statues, seventy feet high, 
though each is sitting with hands upon the knees. They 
are awe-inspiring in their solitary grandeur. But to the 
jatehzcologist one of the most curious things about them 

ls an inscription cut long after the statues themselves 
were carved out of the solid rock. That inscription is 





i 
( 
\ 
i 


| 


22 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


in Greek. It is upon the left leg of one of the giganti 
figures, and below the knee. It is just such an inscrip 
tion as an American Vandal will occasionally cut into 
famous statue or edifice abroad. It records the name! 
of certain Greek mercenaries in the employ of a certail: 
Egyptian king, Psammeticus. The Greek character! 
are of antique style. The letter Omicron answers bot} 
for Omicron and Omega, and so we are assured that it 
date must be before the year 540—for from this tim) 
inscriptions have the Omega—Omega being the last iv 
order of the Greek alphabet, simply because it was th 
last—the last letter invented and added. ! 

If we can only learn the date of this Egyptian Kin; 
Psammeticus, we can fix more narrowly the time of thi 
inscription. There were unfortunately four Psammet? 
cuses who might possibly be referred to. But Heroe 
otus mentions an expedition to Ethiopia by Psammeticu 
the Second, and it was probably this expedition oj 
which the Greek mercenaries were employed. Noy 
Psammeticus the Second reigned from 594 to 589 befor 
Christ. Sometime before 589 B.c., therefore, this spec 
men of Greek epigraphy must have been written. C 
the mercenaries some were Jonians and some were Dor 
ans, yet all of them used the Ionic form of the alphabe’ 
This presupposes time for the Ionic alphabet to becom! 
generally used in Greece, and makes it certain thé 
writing was a common art by the middle of the sevent: 





century. | 

The argument is far stronger than this mere stat 
ment of dates would seem to indicate. We have bee 
adducing the evidence of inscriptions upon stone c 
metal, But these imply the long-continued previou 


| ANTIQUITY OF GREEK LETTERS 23 


existence of the easier writing upon leather or parch- 
ment. Archilochus, a poet of about 700 B. c., speaks of 
“a grievous scytale’’—the scytale being the staff on 
which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled 
slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip 
could not be read until the leather was rolled again upon 
another staff of the same size; since only the writer and 
the receiver possessed staves of the proper size, the 
scytale answered all the ends of a message in cypher ; 
so we get back a hundred years earlier and still find 
writing among the Greeks. Hesiod dates from about 
750 B. c., and Hesiod enjoins that children be not 
taught letters before seven years old; and yet we area 
nundred years later than the time of Homer. 
_ How can we bridge that gulf? Shall we consult 
Homer himself? Shall we infer from the tablet which 
Homer represents Bellerophon as carrying from King 
Proetus to Iobates, that the author of the “Iliad” at 
east was familiar with writing? When we read that 
yhere were “written in the folded tablet many ‘soul- 
larassing things,” it seems difficult to believe that any 
nere signs or picture-writing canbe meant. Yet this is 
he clearest allusion to writing in the Homeric poems, 
ind of itself it would be far from proving that the poems 
hemselves were written. Even though this were the 
tase, it would be rather for the help of the composer 
han of the reader, and the poet would not be any more 
ikely to tell us about the mysteries of his art than the 
nodern extemporaneous preacher or orator is apt to 
peak of the elaborate writing which precedes his public 
fforts. 

We frankly confess, therefore, that we have no great 


24 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


amount of direct testimony to the existence of writir 
among the Greeks so early as 850 B. c. But there 
an indirect argument from what we know of oth 
peoples with whom the Greeks had intercourse. TI 
Latin race was by no means so quick-witted as the Gree 
yet Niebuhr tells us that there were written bool 
under the Tarquins, that is, about 750 B.c., althoug 
the oldest Latin inscriptions are several centuries late 
The most ancient Hebrew epigraphy, the inscription ¢ 
the Moabite stone, does not date back farther than 
two hundred years after David and seven hundred yea 
after Moses. Yet Moses was learned in all the wisdo 
of the Egyptians, and during the Egyptian nineteen 
dynasty, which covered Moses’ time, there were “hous 
of books,” that is, there was literature enough to 1 
whole libraries. | 
The recent excavations of Tel el-Amarna have broug 
to light a multitude of clay tablets inscribed with cun 
form characters which record the correspondence of j, 
Egyptian with a Babylonian king. We learn from ther 
to quote the words of Professor Sayce, that “in the 1 
teenth century before our era—a century before t. 
Exodus—-active literary intercourse was going 
throughout the civilized world of Western Asia betwe: 
Babylon and Egypt and the smaller states of Palestir. 
of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and even of Eastern Cap} 
docia. This intercourse was carried on by means of t. 
Babylonian language and the complicated Babyloni 
script. This implies that all over the civilized Ez 
there were libraries and schools where the Babyloni 
language and literature were taught and learned. Bak 
lonian appears to have .been as much the language, 





RECENT EVIDENCE FROM EGYPT 25 


\diplomacy and cultivated society as French has become 
‘in modern times.” 

_ But after all, the common language of Egypt was 
Egyptian, and this use of Babylonian in the fifteenth 
‘century B. C. may be characteristic of the period of the 
‘shepherd kings, during which the old Semitic stock got 
‘possession for a time of the wealth of the Nile valley. 
‘Mr. Petrie, in his recent excavations in the Fayum, 
‘eighty miles southwest of Cairo, has unearthed a town 
‘of the nineteenth dynasty, or of the thirteenth century 
B.C. On the pottery of this town Cypriote or Greek let- 
ters are incised. Another town of pyramid builders, be- 
longing to the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties, yielded 
pottery marked with similar Cypriote letters. He de- 
clares that all the evidence points to a use of this alpha- 
bet before 2000 B. c. 

Dr. Howard Osgood, in his article entitled “The 
‘Oldest Book in the World,” published in the “ Bibliotheca 
Sacra” for October, 1888, takes us back to an earlier 
time, at least three thousand years before Christ, and 
gives the translation of a book of proverbs which might 
almost have formed the model for Solomon. The 
Proverbs of Ptah-hotep are in Egyptian. Renouf, in 
his “ Hibbert Lectures,” declares that in the fourth dy- 
Masty, as early as 3124 B.c., there was in Egypt “a 
universally diffused system of writing and a common use 
of papyrus.” While Professor Hommel of Munich has 
found proofs of high civilization in Arabia as far back 
aS 2000 B. C., the recent explorations of Professor Hil- 
Hecht of the University of Pennsylvania have brought 
to light at Nippur in Babylonia an inscription which he 
regards as earlier than 4000 B. C. 





{ 



























26 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


Yet there are Old Testament critics who tell us tha’ 
Moses, who lived about 1500 B. c., and who was edu 
cated in the court of the Egyptian king, could not possi 
bly have known how to write ; Solomon, who lived abou 
1000 B. c., could not possibly have been enough in ad: 
vance of his time—the time required by the hypothesi 
of natural evolution—to write a book of proverbs. Pro 
fessor Sayce, referring to those who have formed opin 
ions adverse to the historical character of the Pentateuch 
says well that “the Tel el-Amarna tablets have already 
overthrown the primary foundation on which much 0 
this criticism has been built”; and Professor Homme 
declares his conviction that “ Arabia itself will furnish 
us the direct proofs that the modern destructive crit 
icism of the Pentateuch is absolutely erroneous.” | 

Let us apply all this to our present subject. The agi 
of Homer was:six hundred and fifty years after the tiny 


at 


te 





alluded to by Professor Sayce ; eleven hundred and fifty 
years after the time mentioned by Professor Hommel} 
twenty-two hundred and fifty years after that spoken 0 
by Monsieur Renouf; and thirty-one hundred and fifth 
years after that given us by Professor Hilprecht. Thy 
Greeks were a seafaring people, who inhabited not onbh} 
the Argive peninsula with its manifold harbors, but alsi 
the islands of the A£gean and the Adriatic; record 
lately recovered seem to prove that /Xgean Greek 
visited Egypt as early as three thousand years befor’ 
Christ ; in the nature of things the winds and the wave 
must have driven Greeks over the sea to Egypt ani 
Egyptians over the sea to Greece; the Homeric poem 
themselves speak of such intercourse, besides intimatin; 
that there was a coastwise commerce by way of Phe 


WERE THE GREEKS A DULL PEOPLE? 27 


licia; tradition declares that a certain Phoenician, 
vadmus by name, long before the Trojan war introduced 
nto Greece the use of letters; the letters of the Greek 
iphabet are substantially the same witk those of the 
Semitic languages, Alpha being only Aleph, and Beta 
yeing only Beth in disguise; and yet, merely upon the 
‘round that no Greek writing remains to us of demon- 
trably earlier date than B. c. 650, we are asked to be- 
ieve that at 850 B. c. the composer of the Homeric 
ems could not possibly have put them into writing. 
(his, as it seems to us, is to attribute to the Greeks a 
hysical inertia, as well as a mental incapacity to appre- 
end and to appropriate, which are the precise opposites 
f all we know of that eager, curious, colonizing race. 

We find it difficult to believe that it took two thousand 
ears for letters to come around the eastern end of the 
flediterranean Sea from Egypt to Greece. We prefer 
9 think that there was some foundation for the belief 
{ the Greeks themselves that letters among them be- 
mged to the ante-Homeric age. Before the dawn of 
istory the Egyptian Cecrops came, it was said, to 
\thens, and the Egyptian Danaus to Argos. The time 
f the driving out of the shepherd kings from Egypt 
orresponds quite well with these Greek traditions. 
ind how can we explain the universal knowledge of 
cading and writing among the Greeks two hundred 
ears after Homer’s time, unless a very long period of 
struction had gone before? In the days of Solon, six 
undred years before Christ, there were laws forbidding 
1€ erasure of public inscriptions, and the practice of 
stracism prevailed—the marking of a “yes” ora “no” 
pon a pebble of stone. 


28 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 















At the very time of Peisistratus, there were in @ 
istence actual commentaries upon the Homeric poem 
Who ever heard of written commentaries upon an wu 
written poem? The idea that Peisistratus, three cent 
ries after Homer, first committed these poems — 
writing seems to us amazingly improbable. Grant th 
writing in Homer’s time was a mystery known only | 
the few; that it was in possession, not of a readit 
public, but of a poetical and literary guild; that it w 
used as a private help to the bard in composing ar 
memorizing, rather than as a means of communicati¢ 
to others ; still the argument in favor of Homer’s use 
letters seems to us far to outweigh the argument again’ 
it. If the patchwork theory of the Homeric authorsh. 
takes it for granted that writing was unknown or unus¢ 
among the Greeks of Homer’s time, it rests upon ant 
terly unproved and an extremely improbable assumptio, 

We do not stop here, however. Even if it could ] 
proved that Peisistratus first secured the writing out | 
the Homeric poems, we should not surrender the do 
trine of their unity. Our adversaries declare that poen| 
so long as these could never without writing be col! 
posed in the first place, nor afterward be transmitti) 
intact to future generations. Here again we are cot 
pelled to meet each part in the declaration with a sto! 
demurrer. The epic, as its very name intimates, is. 
poem narrated or recited, while the lyric is one sung 
the accompaniment of the lyre. As the epic is intend) 
for public recitation, so in manifold instances it has bet) 
composed without writing, preserved only in the min! 
recited from memory, and, to mix seks, org 
handed down to posterity. 











COMPOSITION POSSIBLE WITHOUT WRITING 29 


| The Old German epic entitled «“Parsifal,” is a poem 
of twenty-four thousand eight hundred and ten lines, 
very much longer than the “Iliad’”’—for the “Iliad” 
vas only fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three 
—yet “Parsifal’” was composed by Eschenbach, who 
sould neither read nor write. The weird poems of the 
[celandic Skalds were for two centuries transmitted 
without writing. The Greek festivals have to this day 
heir blind singers who depend on memory alone to keep 
he thread of their story. Composition is quite possible 
vithout writing, as every public speaker can witness. 
domer, even if he were blind when he composed his 
oems, might still have been quite equal to his task. 
And what was once mentally put into form could also 
iave been mentally preserved. 

_ To us, who in these later days depend upon books to 
ceep our treasures for us and use our memories so little, 
he retention of a whole “ Iliad” or a whole “ Odyssey” 
vithout break or error, seems to savor of the miraculous. » 
Memory does little for us because we give memory so 
ittle todo. We have come to cherish a sort of mild 
‘ontempt for the memorizer, and we doubt the mental 
srasp of the man of facts and dates. Not so in the early 
lays. Mnemosyne was then one of the Muses. Memory 
vas cultivated, cherished, trusted, honored. Of Alex- 
inder and of Czesar it was said that they knew all their 
joldiers by name; the story at any rate proves that they 
hought such ability no disgrace to them. There were 
educated men in Athens who knew the whole “Iliad” 
ind “ Odyssey”’ by heart and could recite them straight 
m from any point where they were asked to begin. 
And such power is not entirely wanting in recent 





30 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 


times. Macaulay could repeat, at fifty, long poen 
which he had never glanced at since he read the) 
for the first and only time at fifteen. And Scalige 
that modern wonder of learning and scholarship, cor 
mitted the whole of Homer to memory in twelve day 
and all the extant Greek poets in three months. If vw 
only now consider that in prehistoric times this cor. 
posing and reciting of epic poetry was a regular trad, 
so richly rewarding with gifts and honors those wh 
were its masters that memory was stimulated to p 
forth its highest powers, we shall rid ourselves of tl 
last vestige of doubt whether poems as long as Homer 
could have been composed without writing and the 
handed down substantially intact for several centuries, 

We ought not to miss here the incidental advantag 
of our present study in furnishing a parallel to the or 
transmission of the Gospel narratives. All compete! 
investigators now agree that from twenty-five to thirt) 
five years intervened between the death of our Lord at 
the putting into its present written form of each of tl 
Synoptics. And there are not wanting those who d 
clare that even in that brief time the stories of ee | 
life might become so altered as to be untrustworthy. | 

But these critics are strangely forgetful of some ve: 
common facts. A sacred narrative, which has assum 
stereotyped form and which passes from lip to lip, mi 
be submitted to a constant process of verification. Ju 
as many an aged saint who knows her Bible mentil 
corrects the slips in a young preacher’s quotations, | 
the first disciples, we may believe, were evermore CO) 
ning and correcting the oral narratives which they hear) 


urging them of excrescences when such appeared, ar) 
purging s | 





. 





{ 





) THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY 31 


bringing them back to the standard form. A narrative 
upon which the church was founded and for which 
‘Christians had to answer with their lives might con- 
ceivably have been handed down, not simply for twenty- 
five or thirty-five years, but for a century, without seri- 
ous loss or change. The Gospel problem seems an easy 
one when we have once granted that the Homeric poems 
could have been transmitted intact for more than three 
hundred years. 
_ And yet we are not quite through with the objections 
of Paley. To all that have been mentioned he adds this 
last. of all: Homer, he says, could not have composed 
poems so long as the “Iliad” and the “ Odyssey,” for 
the reason that there was no reading or hearing public 
to be addressed by such poems. It is the old evolu- 
tionary theory in a new guise. The simple must come 
before the complex. Early times have patience and 
attention only for poems that are brief and fragmentary. 
The complicated epic whole must be the result of the 
constructive and combining genius of later times. 
_ Unfortunately for this theory the facts are all against 
it. There was just such a public as the full-fledged 
“Tliad”’ or “ Odyssey” requires. It was found in the 
halls of the petty kings or chieftains of early Greece. 
There every comer was welcome and there were many 
guests. The numerous retainers of the household con- 
stituted of themselves a sufficient audience, and the 
songs of the bard were the chief amusement of the 
evening, as athletic games and sports were the amuse- 
ment of the day. 

Minstrelsy was a recognized and honored profession. 
In the simple days when society has emerged from bar- 


32 THE HOMERIC QUESTION 







barism, but has not yet taken on the conventional refine: 
ments of an advanced civilization, nothing so stirs the 
blood and rouses enthusiasm as the story of martia) 
deeds. In “Ivanhoe,” Sir Walter Scott has given us @ 
glimpse of such entertainment in the rude halls of ow 
Anglo-Saxon ancestry. So it was among the Greeks| 
Evening after evening the singer was assured of one 
constant audience. Instead of being compelled to tell hi, 
whole story in a single night, he was the best poet whe 
could longest spin his tale. Provided only that part wai 
connected with part, that there was development of plot 
and all tended to a fitting climax, he might sing on fo} 
a thousand and one nights, like Queen Scheherezade. | 

The genuine epic, then, being only a metrical kind 0 
story-telling, naturally has its place at the beginnings o 
civilization. It is history and mythology and poetry an | 
music all in one. As the incentives to its cultivatiol 
are then the greatest, and as original genius 1s ther 
most free from the fetters of precedent, it is only natura 
that we should find in these primitive times some of th’ 
greatest masters of spontaneous song. Patriarcha 
monarchy and family life afford the typical field for tH 
development of epic poetry. | 

Lyric poetry just as naturally belongs to the later da 
of aristocracies, when a privileged class takes the plae! 
of the large family life we have described. Now, the on) 
great house and gathering place is replaced by many an 
smaller mansions ; meetings are of the few; we find th’ 
exclusiveness of good society; there are other means C 
entertainment as well; the song must be elegant, cq 
ventional, and brief. | 

Last of all comes the time of democracy, when powsl 


THERE WAS A HEARING PUBLIC 33 


} 


has gotten into the hands of the people. Then the whole 
free population of a city must be amused. It is an 
audience that does not long hold together; it is the 
time of the rhapsodists or reciters of select portions of 
the old songs ; the new poetry is all dramatic, suited to 
the entertainment in the open air of large numbers at 
once. This progress from epic to lyric and from lyric to 
dramatic poetry was a matter of actual history in 
Greece. When Paley tells us, then, that a reading 
public did not exist in Greece before the year 430 B. C., 
we do not simply content ourselves with denying the 
fact, we claim that it makes no difference to our thesis 
whether there was or not. There certainly was a hearing 
public, and precisely such a one existed in the two cen- 
turies after the Trojan war as might furnish the best op- 
portunity and incentive to the epic genius of a Homer. 
The reader has doubtless concluded long since that 
this argument is endless, and I am myself pretty nearly 
of his opinion. There are a score of points, all of them 
important and interesting, which I might have embraced 
in my treatment. Ihave confined myself to a few which 
can be popularly stated. The result of the investigation 
may well remind us of that not too learned English stu- 
dent, who, being required on examination to give the 
present state of the Homeric question, said: “The old 
view was that both the poems were written by Homer, 
but it is now concluded that they were written by 
another man of the same name.”’ However learned and 
plausible the theories of a later putting together of 
ancient poetical fragments may be, they all suffer ship- 
wreck on this single rock—the necessity of finding in 


the early time of the petty kings some commanding 
G - 


SS 


34 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


genius capable of gathering the traditional material, or 
ganizing it about one central theme, and determining it, 
poetical form. This genius must have been one, no 
many ; and itis not credulity, but simple common sense! 
to take for our own the well-nigh unanimous consent 0 
antiquity, and to call that genius by the name of Homer 
II 

I have been treating of the Homeric Question. Bu 

I have not been j 





Presenting Thebes and Pelops’ line, 
Or the tale of Troy divine, 


t 
y 
1 


: 
i 
entirely for its own sake. I have intended it to prepag 
the way for a succinct account of the Homeric The! 
ology. To this latter theme I now address myself. | 
wish I could relieve my reader’s fears by assuring hin, 
that the temple to which I introduce him is, like thi 
temple at Jerusalem, far smaller than the portico at it 
entrance. But I cannot so easily part company wit 
the principles of rhetoric. The Homeric Theology i is a, 
noble a subject, and it requires as long a treatment, aj 
the Homeric unity. This latter question, indeéd, dé 
rives much of its importance from its connection wit, 
the former. If Homer is only a name for many bard) 
scattered in space and time, then the Homeric theolog 
can hardly be expected to have consistency and unity, 
If, on the contrary, there was one Homer, and th) 
“Tliad” and the “ Odyssey” were both his work, the; 
from the poems of this great genius of the early worl) 
we may hope to learn something about that early world 
religious doctrines and beliefs. ‘That there was on| 









HOMER HAD HIS THEOLOGY 35 


Homer, and that he composed both of the poems which 
after times have ascribed to him, with the possible ex- 
ception of unimportant interpolations, I propose hence- 
forth to take for granted, and I would now ask only 
about his theology. 

It is perhaps unnecessary to say, and yet to prevent 
my possible misconception it may be well distinctly to 
leclare, that I do not profess to find in Homer a charac- 
eristically religious poet. Homer never heard of the 
vord “theology,” nor did he ever write the «TIliad” 
fhe “ Odyssey”’ with the conscious aim of setting raat 
heological ideas. Not the epic poets, but the tragedi- 
ims, were the religious teachers of the Greeks. The 
ragic stage, upon which A%schylus produced his « Pro- 
netheus Bound,” and Sophocles brought out his 
‘Antigone,” was the Greek pulpit, and there we are to 
ook for appeals to conscience and threats of the gods, 
(he Athenian archon, under whose charge these plays 
vere represented, was clothed for the purpose with 
riestly dignity, and the whole office was an office of 
pon. The epic, on the other hand, was more nearly 
‘Means of amusement, when instruction and amusement 
rent hand in hand. Its place was the court of the petty 
ing, its time the hours that followed the games and the 
anquet. If we could conceivably have a tragedy from 
1€ time of Homer, we should doubtless have more of 
sligion and more of theology than Homer has given us. 

Yet Homer had his theology, notwithstanding; for 
Vey poet puts together in more or less complete form 
re facts which he has apprehended about Deity and 
1e relations of Deity to the universe. Se moguer de la 
hilosophie, cest vraiment philosopher—to mock at 


; 







36 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


philosophy is to philosophize ; and even when Home 
satirizes the gods he shows that he has ideas about them! 


God, of man, and of their mutual relations. I propost 
simply to ask what are Homer's ideas about God am 
what are his ideas about man’s relations to God. God 
sin, atonement, a future life—these are the determininy 
elements of every theological system ; if we can lear: 
what Homer thinks of these, we shall have the substane 
of his theology. | 
- Perhaps the first thing that strikes the thoughtf 
reader of the Homeric poems is their undertone ¢ 
monotheism. This may surprise some who have re 
garded Homer only as a polytheistic poet, yet it is nei 
ertheless true. Though there are many gods in th 
“Tliad” and the “Odyssey,” yet they constitute | 
hierarchy in which Zeus is supreme. Very often 
read of “the god,” in the singular number, without th . 
mention of any definite name, and in connections whie 
seem to show that it should be translated simp! 
“God”; in other words, it is an expression of an i 
eradicable belief that deity is one. 
Of this god, whose name is Zeus when any name 
given him, the other gods are in some sense manifest 
tions. Some of them are his children and derive the 
life from him. Two of them, Athene and Spolaas 
hardly more than hypostases, or personifications, of | 
energy; with Zeus these two constitute an inner cir 
and faintly remind us of the biblical Trinity—Athe 
being the divine wisdom and Apollo the executor of t] 
divine will. Here, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Arted 
on 





Sipeeme 


/ 


Se 


ae 


and Aphrodite had a second rank. Then, thirdly, c 


| 
; 


| 
| 7 ZEUS A MAGNIFIED MAN 50% 


Poseidon, Hades, Dione, and Letona, and after them the 
whole multitude of inferior gods who preside over the 
forces of nature or are identified with particular rivers, 
winds, and groves. 

And yet, even of Zeus, the head of this imposing 
hierarchy, as well as of all the other gods, it is true that 
he is but a magnified man. The only absolute dis- 
tinction between gods and men is that of immortality. 
But this immortality of the gods is a physical immor- 
tality. They have bodies like the bodies of men, bodies 
dependent upon physical nutriment. Their food is 
ambrosia indeed, and their drink is nectar; but they 
must perpetually partake of these if they would not die. 
So they are not self-subsistent, like the God of the Bible ; 
the ground of their being is in something outside of 
themselves. As this endless continuity of physical 
being is the only characteristic difference between gods 
and men, it is a bar that may be broken over. Odysseus 
would have become a god if he had accepted Calypso’s 
invitation and had eaten of her promised ambrosia in- 
stead of confining himself to the food of mortals, 
Etymologically and symbolically, ambrosia is itself im- 
mortality, so that the gods feed on immortality, even as 
they wash themselves in beauty. Hence the oath by 
the Styx, the river of the world of the dead, is the only 
sath that irrevocably binds them; for physical death 
would be the end of their godhood. 

_ The bodies of the gods are of great size. When Athene 
i Ares with a stone on the plain of Troy, it is said 
chat “seven roods he covered in his fall.’ They are of 
zreat voice; the battle-cry of Ares and Poseidon is loud 
as the united shout of a myriad of the Greeks. They 





| 
| 
38 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY | 
have their fixed abodes—Poseidon in the depths of 
sea at Aegae, and Ares in the land of Thrace; the tem 
ples consecrated to them are only occasional haunts, 
Hephzstus has built for the family of Zeus perma 
habitations upon Mount Olympus. Though they ar 
subject to these limitations of space, their movement! 
are very rapid; Hermes, it is true, tires of his lon; 
journey to Ogygia, yet one spring of the horses of Her 
takes them through the haze into the distance upon th) 
open sea. Theoretically, the gods know all things am 
can do all things ; practically, they are ignorant of som’ 
of the matters that most concern them; can be mos) 
egregiously deceived ; are obliged to take Bees befor 
they know their own minds; have their wishes hell 
by other gods and even by mortal men, as when Pose} 
don’s son Polyphemus is blinded by Odysseus. 
This antithesis between the theoretical and the actua! 
is one of the most significant things in Homer. Eithe 
as the remains of a primitive revelation handed dow) 
by tradition, or as the result of man’s own religiou 
nature which ever prompts him to “seek God, if haph 
he may feel after him and find him,” the poet is contin 
ually declaring the omniscience and omnipotence of th) 
gods, and yet, almost in the same breath, is most incoz) 
sistently attributing to them all the weaknesses ani 
limitations of men. Again and again they are calle 
“the blessed gods,” and yet we read of their stains ani 
pains, of their wounds and weeping and fear. Theti 
sheds bitter tears over the fate of her son Achilles, ani! 
Zeus is sorely troubled about Here’s anger, even whe) 
the nodding of his dark brow makes Olympus qual 
and assures victory to the Greeks. 























RELATION OF. ZEUS TO FATE 39 


| There is a similar duality in Homer’s representation 
of Fate and of Jove’s relation to it. At times Zeus and 
Fate are one; the same things are ascribed to Zeus and 
to Fate; Zeus is the dispenser of the Fates. But at 
other times Fate appears as a Will side by side with 
that of Zeus, and even over Zeus and all the other gods ; 
they must passively submit to Fate, when they are un- 
willing actively to employ themselves in its accomplish- 
ment. Zeus is the head of an Oriental council, the . 
master of an Oriental harem: that is Homer’s method 
of representing the manifoldness of the divine manifesta- 
tions. Fate is one, inevitable, binding both gods and 
men: that is Homer’s effort to supplement polytheism 
with the inalienable consciousness of the unity and ab- 
soluteness of God. But this Fate, though it stood for 
the highest Homeric conception of the Godhead, never 
was worshiped, never could be worshiped, for it was 
devoid of mind and heart, and could hardly be distin- 
guished from blind and inexorable necessity. 
_ -The idea of something done beyond that which is or- 
dained, something surpassing Fate, is certainly, though 
only rarely, found in Homer; it seems once more to 
open the door that had been closed against divine and 
human freedom, and to relieve the sternness and arbi- 
trariness of Fate. But both Fate and that which is be- 
yond it are equally abstractions ; they have no eye to 
pity and no arm to save. Homer’s doctrine of the God- 
nead shows us two things: first, that human nature de- 
ands a deity free from limitations and lifted above the 
ite; secondly, that human imagination is utterly un- 
able to construct for itself such a deity, and when it at- 
‘tempts the task succeeds only in making a huger finite 


40 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


being like itself. God created man at the first in his owr 
image; the heathenism of which Homer is the nobl Si 
representative can only create a god in the image 0 









man. 
This becomes still plainer when we examine the noel 
conceptions of God’s moral attributes. There can i 
no exacter measure of the chasm that separates th 
Homeric from the biblical theology than the way 1 in 
which they respectively treat God’s attribute of holi 
ness. The Scriptures bring this characteristic of God’ 
nature before us more frequently than any other ; thi 
is the fundamental attribute that conditions all othemll 
this it is that chiefly makes God to be God. But i 
Homer the gods never even once have this quality ex! 
pressly ascribed to them—they are constantly un 
blessed and immortal, but they are never once calle: 
holy. | 
The gods have a sort of moral perception, indeed 
but this is exercised only in estimating the characte 
and acts of men. They are like some men we know of 
who have a very keen conscience for other people, bu' 
very dull for themselves. The noble swineherd, Ev 
mzeus, tells Odysseus that “it is not froward deeds tha 
the gods love, but oy reverence justice and the right 
eous acts of men.” One of the wooers declares the 
“the gods, in the likeness of strangers from far cout 
tries, put on all manner of shapes and wander throug, 
the as: to watch the violence and the righteousnes 
of men.” When the suitors have suffered their deserts 
the aged Laertes can say: “ Father Zeus, verily. ye god 
yet bear sway on high Olympus!” Zeus sends flood 
upon the people whose judges deliver unjust judgments 





| THE GODS INSTIGATE INIQUITY 41 


The gods are displeased because Achilles pitilessly 
retains the body of Hector at the ships and will not take 
ransom for the dead. 

But now observe how in this last instance Homer 
takes back again all that he has given to the gods in 
the way of praise. How came this pitiless spirit into 
Achilles’ heart? Ajax tells us when he addresses the 
nero: “The gods have put within thy breast a spirit 
implacable and evil.” And so the gods appear again 
id again as tempters to perjury and adultery, as in the 
violation of the truce which Zeus himself suggests, and 
n the unfaithfulness of Helen which Aphrodite in- 
spires. It is not enough to say that the gods permit 
these things—they actually bring them about by their 
lirect and efficient causation. How devilish, it has 
geen well remarked, is the deception which Athene in 
he form of Deiphobos practises upon Hector in the 
nour of his extremest need, when she flatters him with 
1 brother’s voice and lures him to destruction! 

_ The truth is, that God and devil are confounded in 
Homer. The suitors look to the gods for help in their 
niquities. The gods regard only their own honor and 
jeasure in the government they exercise. They are 
mvious—Poseidon envies the Greeks their rampart, 
»ecause it rivals the wall he had built for Troy, and he 
mvies the Phzeacians their prosperous voyages, because 
hese voyages seem to make the Phzeacians instead of 
umself the lords of the sea. Not only crime, but hap. 
ness also, is punished by the Furies. 

The gods are revengeful. Here and Athene never 
ease to hate and to afflict the Trojans on account of 
he judgment of Paris, and Poseidon never ceases to 





42 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


pursue Odysseus even though Odysseus’ only fault was 
this, that he had rid the earth of a monster. The 
gods are placable sometimes, but at other times neither! 
a just cause nor manifold offerings can remove their 
anger. The Zeus of Homer is only an immortal man, 
The gods are only projections into space and formal 
embodiments of human feelings, impulses, and passions, 
Aphrodite is little more than a name for illicit desire; 
Hermes for the disposition to falsehood. So Athene at 
times is but a figure for the better judgment of Odys. 
seus or Achilles; Ares stands for the warlike spirit} 
Apollo for presages of the future. q 

This brief survey has been sufficient, I trust, to con: 
vince the reader that Homer’s conception of God is that 
of a nature-deity, who includes in himself all the forces of 
the physical and moral world, whether these are good 
or whether they are evil. Homer’s God is God, world) 
man, and devil, all in one. God is the sum of all hid 
den causes. Different names are given to his various 
manifestations and appearances—and so we have thé 
nine great Olympians and the whole retinue of minor 
gods besides. Personality belongs to him—but ther’ 
in his aspect as Fate impersonality belongs to him also! 
He is moral and is the source of all law among men—| 
but then he is immoral also, and _ his law is an arbitrary 
thing, having no fixed abode in his nature and not al’ 


1. 
am 
ey 





ways enforced on earth. 

It is a most interesting question how such a conceptior 
of the godhead could have originated. Are these “ faii 
humanities of old religion,” so called, the offspring only 
of a mythologizing tendency inherent in the childhooc 
of the race? Some writers would have us believe this| 


ORIGIN OF THIS CONCEPTION 43 


he Greeks, they say, were natural poets. Imagination 
mceived of nature as alive; each natural phenomenon, 
ich movement of the spirit within, seemed due to a 
sparate will; supernatural beings were thought to find 
| human affairs everywhere a field for their activity; 
ie artistic instinct unconsciously wrought over this 
aterial ; the innocent result was the gods of Greece. 
las for the theory, Homer himself furnishes the refu- 
tion of it. There is enough of the divine unity, spir 
uality, and righteousness left in his representations to 
ow that these growths were not wholly imaginative 
id poetic. Ever and anon we hear the deep conscious- 
ss Of God uttering its protests against the impieties 
ith which sense and art seek to drown its voice, 
This god-making was not innocent. It began in the 
sire of fallen humanity to rid itself of the thought of 
moral God who would challenge its impurity and pun- 
1 its transgressions. It transformed the one holy 
ill into many wills, sometimes conflicting, often malig- 
nt, but never unalterably righteous, until at last all 
ings, without the soul and within as well, whether evil 
good, were ascribed to them. Art proceeded to 
the these creations with beauty, but it was a mere- ° 
cious beauty, and it led to further debasement of the 
a itself ; the statues of the gods became an object of 
atry. This is the genesis of heathenism. The 
ostle Paul has given us the only philosophical as well 
the only authoritative account of it. It is not the 
ult of natural evolution, but of guilty degradation. 
presupposes a primitive knowledge of God. The 
athen are “without excuse: because that, knowing 
d, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks, 


SE 


44 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


but became vain in their reasonings and their foolist 
heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise! 
they became fools, and changed the glory of the incor 
ruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptibl! 
man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping 
things.” n 

And so we come naturally to examine the Homer) 
doctrine of sin. It is evident that with such a doctrine 0 
God, the poet’s idea of sin must equally diverge fron 
the truth. If God is a spiritual and personal bein; ; 
whose will is that we be like himself in holiness, they 
sin will be a self-chosen unlikeness to God in characte 
and conduct. But if God is the sum of all natural ter 
dencies and forces, both good and evil, as Homer ren 
sents him, then sin can at its worst be only the short 
sighted following of evil impulses, the origin of whic, 
can in the last analysis be ascribed to God himself. An 
this is actually the prevailing soley ia at of sin in th 
“Tliad” and in the “ Odyssey.” | 

There is no idea in these poems more striking to th 
practical moralist than that contained in the word At 
By derivation and in its practical use, it signifies a b. 
fooling. And this is the chief element in sin. Sin | 
not a matter of will,—the self-assertion of freedom : | 
opposition to the will of God, it nséthe, erroy-om mi: 
take of foolishness, and this foolishness is due to th 
gods themselves. Agamemnon, when he gives accoul 
of the fault he committed against Achilles, declares th 
Zeus had bound him with might in grievous blindne| 
of soul. 4 

In the noble address in which Phoenix, the instru t 
of Achilles, labors to turn the hard heart of his old pup) 






























a ta 


cae Pee 


SIN IS DECEPTION 45 


Ihere occurs so remarkable a description of this Ate, or 


Sin, that I quote it entire : 
| 
Therefore, Achilles, rule thy high spirit ; neither beseemeth 


tthee to have a ruthless heart. Nay, even the very gods can 
yend, and theirs withal is loftier majesty and honor and might. 
c heir hearts by incense and reverent vows and drink-offering and 
purnt-offering men turn with prayer, so oft as any transgresseth 
tid doeth sin. Moreover, prayers of penitence are daughters of 
ia Zeus, halting and wrinkled and of eyes askance, that have 
heir task withal to go in the steps of sin. For sin is strong and 
leet of foot, wherefore she far outrunneth all prayers, and goeth 
yefore them over all the earth making men fall, and prayers fol- 
ow behind to heal the harm. Now whosoever reverenceth Zeus’ 
laughters when they draw near, him they greatly bless and hear 
nis petitions ; but when one denieth them and stiffly refuseth, then 
lepart they and make prayer unto Zeus the son of Kronos, that sin 
nay come upon such an one, that he may fall and pay the price. 





/ Let me quote, also, the words of Agamemnon, after 
Achilles had renounced his wrath. He is speaking of 
is own fault which had roused that wrath. He says 
>omplacently : 


It is not I who am the cause, but Zeus and Destiny and Er- 


nyes, that walketh in the darkness, who put into my soul fierce 
nadness on the day when in the assembly I, even I, bereft 
Achilles of his meed. What could I do? It is God who accom- 
lisheth all. Eldest daughter of Zeus is Ate, who blindeth all, 
| power of bane ; delicate are her feet, for not upon earth she 
oeth, but walketh over the heads of men, making men to fall, 
nd entangleth this one or that. Yea, even Zeus was blinded 
ipon a time, he who they say is greatest among gods and men ; 


ea, even him Here, with female wile, deceived. 


; Then, after describing how Ate deceived even Zeus 
umself, Agamemnon tells us how the father of gods 


nd men awoke from his illusion: 
| 


| 
} 
| 
‘ 
"i 


40 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


; | 
: 


Sharp pain smote him in the depths of his soul, and straight’ 
way he seized Ate by her bright-haired head in the anger of his 
soul, and swore a mighty oath that never again to Olympus ang 
the starry heaven should Ate come, who blindeth all alike. He 
said, and whirling her in his hand, he flung her from the starry 
heaven, and quickly came she down among the works of man 
Thus also I, what time great Hector of the glancing helm way 
slaying Argives at the sterns of our ships, could not be unmindfu’ 
of Ate, who blinded me at the first. But since thus blinded wa: 
I, and Zeus bereft me of my wit, fain am I to make amends anc 
recompense manifold for the wrong. 















+ 
rs 
| 





So we read of Zeus himself falling into sin, and ther 
in revenge leading men into it. Again we see tha’ 
Zeus is both God and Satan. | 

The result is that we have no deep confessions of sin 
and no deep penitence, either in the “Iliad” or thé 
“Odyssey.” How can there be either, when the blame 
of sin is shifted from man to Ate or Zeus or Fate? Thi 
later Greek tragedy shows much more of the working} 
of remorse than we find in Homer, yet even in the late! 
Greek tragedy CEdipus declares that his evil deeds havi 
been suffered, and not done. It was the terrors of ‘| 
guilty conscience that first led men to turn the mora, 
God into the unmoral gods—then they reaped the frui’ 
of their error in a new depravation of their moral con’ 
sciousness ; the unmoral gods became so far the author: 
of men’s sins that the sense of guilt well-nigh disap 
peared. 

Well-nigh disappeared, I say, but not altogether. Jus) 
as we recognized an inconsistency in Homer’s repre 
sentations of God, so we must recognize an inconsist) 
ency in his representations of sin. Through the mis. 
of this self-excusing theory there gleam again and agait 


YET SIN IS SELF-DECEPTION ALSO 4.7 


| 
the inextinguishable lights of the earlier and truer faith. 
Vonscience now and then asserts herself. Hector, when 
arged by Andromache not to enter the fight, speaks of 
he sore shame he will feel, if, like a coward, he shrinks 
‘rom the battle ; yet, when at last he ventures to under- 
ake the Peat with Achilles, he fears lest he has un- 
Jone the Trojan host by his wantonness. Not only the 
(ire for fame, but the sense of honor, keeps from evil 
leeds and prompts to bravery. Self-respect is a power 
n the Homeric poems; and in the assertion of the bet- 
er self against the seductions of ease and pleasure, we 
ind a remnant of fidelity to conscience. 

It is true that this self-respect not unfrequently be- 
omes exaggerated and perverted. The conscience that 
as no standard outside of self sometimes applauds self- 
eeking. Yet overweening pride and self-assertion are 
ot only objects of dislike, but they are charged to men’s 
ccount and are visited with unmistakable punishments, 
“hese are the faults of Achilles, and the fact that Zeus 
nbues him with pitiless revenge is not regarded as 
MP oyine his responsibility. Giving place to one’s own 
ardihood and strength is a crime before both gods and 
ten. Men can yield to wantonness, being the fools of 
1eir own force. Ajax might have escaped his doom at 
1€ hands of Poseidon had he not let a proud word fall 
! the fatal darkening of his heart, when he said that in 
le gods’ despite he had escaped the great gulf of the 
‘a. | 
Here then we have a partial corrective applied by 
diner himself to that very superficial and immoral 
mception of sin which prevails in his poems. Sin is, 
ter all, not wholly a deception from without, a work of 





a oe 


48 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


the oe in which man is simply passive. Sin is als 
man’s own act, the expression of his selfishness. It 1 
pride and self-will, infatuated with the conceit of indé 
pendence, and despising alike the ordinances of the god 
and the rights of men. While sin is deception, it is sel} 
deception also. And so, side by side with the commo’ 
disposition to excuse sin and throw the blame of it 0 
the gods, we find an occasional word of self- reproacl. 
In Helen, the great sinner of the Homeric story, eve 
while she attributes her faithlessness to Fate and 7 
Aphrodite, there ever lives a feeling of guilt and nm 
morse; she calls herself a hateful wretch, a shameles 
bitch. And there is definite expectation of punishmer 
for sin; at times “a fearful looking for of judgment.” | 

The whole course of the two poems is proof that th 
- unsophisticated moral sense of mankind demands repari 
tion for wrong-doing. On the one hand, Achilles’ ino 
dinate anger is punished by the slaying of Patroclus, hr 
dearest friend; on the other hand, the sin of Paris an, 
of his countrymen who abetted it meets its just retrib/ 
tion in the death of Hector and the predicted fall 
Troy. Through ten years of outrage and insolence || 
the hands of the wooers, Telemachus has no resourt 
but his trust in the avenging righteousness of the cod 
Warnings only harden these evil-doers. They hay 
fearful premonitions of their doom, but they only bani: 
them with laughter. The gods are represented ' 
arranging circumstances in such a way as to bring the 
iniquity to a head and to occasion its most flagra| 
manifestation. Their sin is punished by involving the 
in more aggravated wickedness, until at length pe 
suasions and entreaties are useless, for their appoint 


























{ 


| 
day of vengeance has already come. When the arrows 
of Odysseus strike the suitors at the very culmination of 
their villainy, those arrows are the very thunderbolts of 
Zeus. The hero proclaims himself to be the executor 
of the divine judgments when he says : “ These hath the 
lestiny of the gods overcome and their own cruel 
leeds.” 
: Sin is ill-deserving ; sin puts the sinner in antagonism 
o God; sin is sure to be punished; the infatuation of 
iin is itself a part of its punishment—these great truths 
itand fast in Homer, in spite of the easy shifts by which 
1€ commonly relieves the conscience and dims the holi- 
iess of God. ‘The doctrine of Scripture is purer than | 
Tomer’s, for while Scripture tells us that God hardened 
*haraoh’s heart, it does not fail, in close connection 
herewith, to tell us that Pharaoh hardened his own 
eart, and so to intimate that the divine operation is not 
nmediate or causative, but only permissive and indirect, 
nrough the circumstances which God ordained and the 
leans of enlightenment which he gave, but which Pha- 
a0h’s evil disposition seized upon as an occasion for the 
lanifestation of his own heart’s iniquity. There are no 
ermissive decrees in Homer, and this is the chief defect 
1 his doctrine of sin. At the best, the responsibility 
or transgression is divided between man and God, and 
science has the force of her accusations partly broken. 
et even Homer teaches that sin deserves death, and 
lat punishment is a debt due to the gods. The “Iliad” » 
id the “Odyssey” are everlasting witnesses to the 
indamental postulates of natural religion. 
| Homer, as we have seen, recognizes that sin deserves 
sath and that punishment is a debt due to the gods, 
D 


AND SIN DESERVES DEATH 49 





ennai 5. 


50 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


Can there be remission of penalty and pardon of th 
guilty? Is there any way by which man may be jus : 
with God? Has God ever made himself known as tht 
Helper and Saviour of sinners? These are question: 
which we have still to ask our poet. The answer t 
them will constitute the Homeric doctrine of aton 
ment. " . 
There are burnt- OHeries and sin-offerings in both thi 
“Tliad’” and “Odyssey.” The most striking of them al 
occurs in the first book of the former poem. The fata 
shafts of Apollo are falling thick and fast in the Greciai 
camp, and men are everywhere dying under the inflic 
tion. The god is angered at the insult offered to hi 
priest and temple, by the capture of Chryseis, th 
priest’s daughter. Reparation must be made. Odysseu’ 
is made the captain of a ship of twenty oarsmen, © i 
which Chryseis is taken to her father, and. with her a 
offering to the god. When they reach Apollo’s templ 
they purify themselves and cast the defilements into th 
sea, and sacrifice unblemished hecatombs of bulls an 
goats, and the sweet savor arises to heaven eddyin 
amidst the smoke. Then speaks Odysseus to th 
priest : ‘“‘ Chryses, Agamemnon, king of men, sent m 
hither to bring thy daughter, and to offer to Phoebus. 
holy hecatomb on the Danaans’ behalf, wherewith t 
propitiate the king that hath now brought sorrow 3 
lamentation on the Argives.” So Chryses lifts up1 
hands and prays aloud for them: “ Hearken to me, gc 
of the silver bow, that standest over Chryse and ho 
Killa, and rulest Tenedos with might ; even as erst the 
heardest my prayer, and didst me honor, and might: 
afflictedst the people of the Danaans, even so now fulf 





} 


| DOES IT INVOLVE SUBSTITUTION ? SI 
| 


ne this my desire: remove thou from the Danaans forth- 
with the loathsome pestilence.” Thus he speaks in 
yrayer, and Phcebus Apollo hears him. 

The object of this sacrifice is expressly said to be 
wopitiation, and propitiation is the turning away of 
mger. The anger of the god has been incurred by sin, 
ind this sin has involved guilt and defilement. The de. 
ilement is symbolically put away by the washing of 
Jdysseus’ company and by the casting into the depths 
if the sea of the water that has removed their stains. 
‘he guilt is atoned for by the shedding of the blood and 
he burning of the flesh of animals offered in sacrifice. 
satisfaction is in this way rendered to the offended 
lajesty of the god, and pardon is secured for the 
ffenders. No one can read Homer without perceiving 
tat this element of satisfaction to the deity enters into 
very sacrifice of every sort. 

In the sacrifices of the Bible there is another element 
[ equal importance—that of substitution. Satisfaction 
y substitution makes up the full conception of the 
fering there. Is this element of substitution found in 
lomer? Not so plainly, we grant, as it is found in 
ter Greek poetry, where Hermes declares to Prometheus 
iat he shall not be released until some god appear as a 
lccessor to his sufferings, one willing to go down to 
ades and Tartarus for him; not so plainly as the 
atin poets declare it, when Ovid bids the gods take 
¢ heart and flesh of the victim for the heart and flesh 
the offerer, and Virgil says of the sacrifice: “One 
sad shall be given for the many.” But even in the 
Iliad” and the “Odyssey” there is evidence that the 
€a of substitution is by no means wholly absent. The 











52 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


| 
' 


shedding of the blood of the brute is an alternative se 
over against the shedding of the blood of the sinner. — 

When Agamemnon has slain the lambs before th 
single combat of Paris and Menelaus, he pours fort 
wine with their blood before the gods, and the Achzan 
pray: “Zeus, most glorious, most great, and all ye im) 
mortal gods! which folk soever be first to sin agains 
the oaths, may their brains be so poured forth upon th 
earth even as this wine, theirs and their children’s, 
All through the “Odyssey” there is the continual pre 
monition of coming doom in the declaration that th 
evil deeds of the suitors are unatoned for; the offering) 
which they make are devoid of any power to avert ¢ 
postpone their fate; when they die at the hands | 
Odysseus, they themselves pay to the gods the penalt 
which they fain would have escaped by sacrifice. | 

The Old Testament shows us a system of sacrifi¢ 
much more fully developed, and one which enables us t| 
understand the offerings of the Homeric poems. In thi 
scapegoat, we have the analogue of the defilement 
which Odysseus casts into the sea; while the burnin 
of the slain beasts is in both cases the same. Thi 
Hebrew conception of God as holy and of man as pe’ 
sonally guilty, made the bloody offering of the Old Te 
tament a recognized picture of the ill-desert of sin an’ 
of vicarious satisfaction for it; the death of the anim 
took the place of the death which the offerer had incurre) 
by his transgression and restored him to the divine favo 
We are persuaded that the sacrificial language of th 
“Jliad” and the “Odyssey” can never be explaine| 
except by supposing that it is the relic of an age whe 
the race had a better understanding of God and of sini 

















| OLD TESTAMENT ANALOGUES 53 


| Men in Homer’s time have forgotten God’s holiness 
and have blinded themselves to the fact of their own 
| guilt, so that at last much of the meaning of the sacrifices 
‘which they traditionally offer has dropped out ; at times 
they seem to be regarded as in themselves a sufficient 
‘compensation for the offense committed ; at times the 
‘sensuous gratification of the god appeases his anger. 

But the outward forms still remain, and, whenever con- 
science revives, it puts into them more or less of their 
old significance. Sacrifice is evermore a vivid, because 
a divinely appointed picture, of sin’s desert of death and 
of the divine intention that man’s guilt shall be removed 
by the laying of it upon another and so make perfect 
satisfaction to the law and justice of God. Homer re- 
tains the element of satisfaction to God’s justice; he only 
secasionally, and then vaguely, suggests substitution, 

_ Let us not blame Homer too much. Those were the 
times of ignorance, which God in his forbearance over- 
.ooked. Christ had not yet come. Not even the Jew 
was yet aware,that God himself was to provide the lamb 
‘or a burnt-offering, and that all this paraphernalia of 
sacrifice was only a mute prophecy of the atoning work 
%£ the Son of God. To the Homeric age the gods 
vere far away. They had mingled with men long be- 
‘ore the war of Troy, but that intercourse had ceased. 

Chere were no present communications either in the way 
if teaching or command. The will of the gods could be 
, ae only by inference from the history of the past, 

r by the obscure leadings of natural insight. As the 
ee declares, God suffered men to walk in their 
vays and to demonstrate the inability of human nature, 
eft to itself, to find the way of peace or holiness, 





54 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


Homer’s doctrine of sacrifice can give no peace to a 
guilty conscience, for it is a merely human offering Fi 
none can say whether the gods will accept it ; they may 
indeed be moved to pity and forgiveness, but then they 
may not; the result is wholly arbitrary and uncertain: 
Hecuba offers an embroidered robe, if perchance she 
may induce the goddess to spare Hector, but Pallas 
Athene denies the prayer. Odysseus slays the ram te 
secure pardon for his killing of the Cyclops, but Zeus 
heeds not the sacrifice. These are examples of at 
tempted expiation that accomplish nothing. The most 
Homer can assure us of is the possibility of forgiveness 
The gods determine arbitrarily the limits of their anger, 
and humanity lives without the certainty of mercy. 

Let this examination of the Homeric doctrine teack 
us the immeasurable superiority of the Christian scheme 
Here we have what natural religion and philosophy can) 
not give—a sure word of God, a voice from out of the 
darkness and the silence, declaring that there is for 
giveness with him that he may be feared; that if thi 
wicked will forsake his way, and the unrighteous mar 
his thoughts, and will turn unto the Lord, he will have. 
mercy upon him, and unto our God, he will abundanth) 
pardon. And if this assurance seem, in view of God’ 
holiness and our sin, too great to be believed, we haw 
made known to us the immutable foundation upon whiel 
the promise is based, the provision of grace in accord 
ance with which God can be just and yet justify the be 
liever in Jesus. 

In the Christian system there is an atoning sacrific 
provided not by man but by God himself, a sacrifice 0 
nobler name and richer blood than any offered upor 


| 








| ESCHATOLOGY IN HOMER 55 


| heathen or Jewish altars, even the sacrifice of the Son 
of God himself. God has come down to earth again 
and has joined himself to humanity in more perfect 
‘manner than ever Homer fabled of Aphrodite or of 
Zeus, in order that he might lift man up to heaven in 
‘more perfect manner than Homer fabled of Hercules 
when he married Hebe, the daughter of eternal youth. 
‘Aye, God in the person of his Son has put his own 
'great shoulders under the burden of our guilt and has 
‘himself suffered as an-atonement to his own violated 
‘holiness, in order that the sinner may be saved. Hea- 
'thenism tells us that the gods have certain favorites whom 
‘they love, sometimes without regard to morals or to 
justice, but it never tells us that they love man every- 
where, even in his sins, and that they love him so greatly 
‘that they are willing to die, and actually die, in his be- 
half. Christianity alone shows us that the glory of God 
is in self-sacrifice, that the lifting up of the Godhead 
above humanity and the coming down of the Godhead 
into humanity are one and the same thing. Heathen- 
ism is the vain attempt of man, by self-moved and self- 
dependent works and sacrifices, to lift himself up to God. 
Christianity is God’s coming down in mercy and grace, 
to do what man can never do for himself, namely, to 
redeem man from his sins and to lift him up to God. 
| A few words with regard to Homer’s ideas of the 
future life must complete our view of the Homeric the- 
ology. The reader will be able to anticipate the most 
te we can say, if he will but remember how far Homer 
S from recognizing the independence of the human 
will, and how completely he makes immortality depend 
pon the continued existence of the body. After the 


56 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


soul has left its earthly tenement, it wanders desolate 
on the shores of the other world, but being bodiless, it 
is destitute of full personality. Memory and hope anf 
alike obliterated. Only when the shadowy dead drink 
the blood of the sacrifices to which Odysseus invites 
them, do they recover their recollection of the past anc 
their ability to recognize the living. 

In all this we have testimony to great truths, though, 
these truths are most dimly apprehended. That the 
cidolon, or shade, continues to exist after death, ever 
although separated from the body it once inhabited 
shows that Homer was no materialist after all; at thi 
risk of an inconsistency, he will recognize the spiritua 
nature of man. But this shadowy existence is hardly t/ 
be called existence—it is devoid of all that renders lif) 
desirable. When Odysseus in the house of Hade’ 
assures the shade of Achilles that the Achzans give hin, 
honor with the gods and count him a prince among th) 
dead, the hero only answers: ‘Nay, speak not com 
fortably to me of death, great Odysseus. Rather woul, 
I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with | 
landless man who had no great Hues than bea 
sway among all the dead that are no more.’ | 

And the longing for the renewal of physical life e 
plains the strange eagerness with which the ghost 
crowd about Odysseus, and clamor for the draught C 
blood which will even momentarily reanimate the 
powers and give them back again the consciousnes) 
which death had taken from them. It is Homer’s wa) 
of telling us that man is a two-fold being; that an it 
termediate state in which the soul is sundered fror 
the body is an abnormal state; that the truest life i| 















| 


| LIFE INCOMPLETE WITHOUT THE BODY 57 


impossible except in a state where soul and body are 
joined together. As there is only a shadow of man’s 
being in that other world, so that world itself is but 
the shadow of a world. Orion drives the wild beasts 
over the mead of asphodel, and Minos wields a golden 
isceptre, giving sentence from his throne to the dead ; 
but both the mead of asphodel and the golden sceptre, 
like Orion and Minos themselves, are shadows. 

Yet in that under-world, on the other side of Oceanus, 
in the sunless West, there are those who punish men, and 
the heavier crimes meet their just desert. How all this 
is possible in a world where the bodiless soul is incapable 
of thought or memory, we must not too narrowly in- 
quire. The spirit at anyrate still lives. It is regarded 
as in some sense freed from the limitations of sense. 
‘Invisible, its existence is somewhat like that of the gods. 
It can have libations made to it, and can be addressed in 
prayer. Inthe last book of the “ Iliad,” Achilles draws 
wine from a golden bowl and pours it forth upon the 
earth, calling meantime upon the spirit of hapless Patro- 
clus. In the last book of the Odyssey, Odysseus makes 
a drink-offering and entreats with many prayers the 
strengthless heads of the dead. The reader cannot fail 
to perceive that we have here, not in Scripture, the 
origin of the invocation of the saints. The dvi manes 
became in the Roman Catholic church the canonized 
departed, and this very term div7 was used to character- 
ize them. The apotheosis which lifted Leucothea and 
Ganymede from earth to heaven was held to have its 
Christian counterpart in the act by which God makes 
men partakers of the divine nature and causes them to 
sit with him upon his heavenly throne. 





58 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


Yet this idea of future reward for the righteous has 
very narrow and meager expression in Homer. O1 
Menelaus alone is it declared that he is not ordained t¢ 
die, but that the deathless gods will convey him to the 
Elysian plain and to the world’s end where life is easiest 
for men. No snow is there, nor yet great storm, no? 
any rain; but alway ocean sendeth forth its breezes te 
blow cool on men. As there is no distinct statement 
of punishment for all the wicked, but only for the most 
outrageous transgressors, so there is no distinct promise 
of happiness for the good, but only for a few excep 
tional favorites of the gods. The doctrine of future re: 
wards and punishments was in later times far more fully 
developed—only the germs of it do we find in Homer! 
Indeed he cannot develop it, for the one means by 
which, in accordance with his general system, blessed! 
ness could be assured to the departed has never oc 
curred to him. Consciousness and happiness are de’ 
pendent on the possession of a physical organism. Tru 
life can be ours only by joining body and soul once mort 
together. But Homer nowhere tells us of a resurrect} 
tion; he knows no way of rescue from the power of thé 
grave ; life and immortality have not yet been brough’ 
to light by the gospel. Here is another truth which: 
Moses knew, and the Egyptians long before him, bu’ 
which became so lost out of the beliefs of the Greeks 
that when Paul proclaimed Jesus and the resurrectiot) 
to the men of Athens, they only mocked at him, an¢ 
thought his story too silly for a hearing. 4 

And as for hope in death, Homer has nothing of thi! 
either. The golden fabric of life is shot with many ¢ 
thread of sorrow. Outwardly the world is fresh an¢ 







| THE HUMAN INTEREST PREDOMINATES 59 


young, and it rejoices in its youth, but the joy is super- 
icial—listen intently and you will hear a sound of wail- 
ng over the instability and brevity of earthly things. 
Age finds death welcome, for death puts an end to pains 
§ body and the caprice of fortune; but, when death 
somes, it only ushers the soul into a cheerless region of 
vandering and retribution, where there are indeed bitter 
yunishments for the wicked, but no sure rewards for the 
ighteous. ‘There is no rest for the weary in this pres- 
nt world, and there is still less rest for the weary in 
he world to come. How strangely incongruous with 
he whole tenor of the “ Iliad” and the “Odyssey ” would 
ye an interpolation of that verse from John’s Gospel, “I 
m the resurrection, and the life; he that believeth on 
ne, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever 
veth and believeth on me shall never die’; or this 
rom the Apocalypse, “ Blessed are the dead which die 
a the Lord from henceforth ; yea, saith the Spirit, that 
hey may rest from their labors; for their works follow 
vith them.” 

If there is any one lesson which, more than any 
ther, is taught us by this study of Homer, it is man’s 
eed of a special divine revelation. We see humanity 
lindly groping after the truth with regard to God, sin, 
tonement, the future life, but utterly unable to reach 

These great poems do not teach us so much of 
ivinity as they do of humanity. They set before us in 
ivid pictures the ideas of courage and endurance which 
lake the ideal man, when once God's ideal of humanity 
as faded out of sight. It is this human interest which 
lakes both the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” great; in 
ach there stands forth a living man ; Achilles represents 


60 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 









the grandeur, as Odysseus represents the virtue, of the 
heroic character. In each poem the hero is made t¢ 
speak out, and to act out, an inner life peculiarly hiy 
own: the fiery wrath of Achilles and the fiery love tha’ 
conquers it, the patient faithfulness of Odysseus and his 
many devices—these, and not mere external incidents) 
are the subjects which the poet is intent upon develop 
ing. How different from the Christian standard 0} 
humility and mercy is the warlike grandeur of Achilles) 
How different from the Christian standard of simplicity 
and truth is the wily wisdom of Odysseus! Heather 
doctrine has begotten heathen morality—the ae 
cannot rise higher than its fountain. | 

Yet these natural virtues, half-barbaric as they are: 
have a splendid vigor in Homer’s pages, and they wil 
never cease to captivate the world. And Homer’ 
women, with what slight touches, yet how masterly anc 
sure, are these selected types painted upon the canvas | 
I do not speak of Helen, whose imperishable beauty| 
through all the vicissitudes of war and conquest subduer 
both friend and foe, even though alternate self-reproact| 
and easy indifference reveal the shallowness of hei 
nature. I do not speak of Nausicaa, that picture of purt 
girlishness, in which zatveté and dignity, sagacity an¢ 
modesty, innocent curiosity and womanly promise, st 
exquisitely blend. I speak rather of Andromache, thi 
heroine of the “ Iliad,” the tender wife and mother, whost 
grief at Hector’s loss so crushes her that she has no! 
even one word of anger or reproach for those who slev 
him. And I speak of Penelope, the heroine of thi 
«“ Odyssey.’ As Andromache is the model of passive 
so Penelope is the model of active, suffering. Here i 





SPLENDOR OF THE HOMERIC POETRY 61 


narital fidelity, which through the long and lonely years 
jolaces itself indeed with weeping, yet ever weaves 
mew the web of hope and planning for her lord’s return. 
In the depicting of these characters, so individual all 
ind so distinct, Homer, more than any other poet ex- 
ept Shakespeare, absorbs himself; the creator is lost 
n his creations ; we know much about Ajax and Ther- 
ites, about Circe and Eumzeus, but we know very little 
bout Homer himself. 

| There is a spontaneity and exuberance of imagery, 
moreover, an endless fertility of invention, a largeness 
md roundness of conception, a dewy sparkle and fresh- 
iess of phrase, that befit the early morning time of his- 
ory. How unconventional and yet how graphic, how 
rnate and yet how simple, how definite and yet how 
ublime, is the poetry of Homer! Physical health 
weathes through it; more than any other epics, these 
re the poems of out-of-doors. The earth, the sky, and 
he loud-resounding main are here. On the plain of 
‘roy we catch the dazzling gleam of the innumerable 
ronze, as the serried ranks of the Greeks move for- 
yard to the fray. On the waters we hear the shrill 
yest wind whistling through the cordage and singing 
ver the wine-dark sea. By day the Achzans fight like 
nto burning fire, saying that one omen is best, to fight 
3r one’s country. By night the watch-fires of the Tro- 
ans are countless as the stars when the air is windless 
nd all heaven opens to the view and the shepherd’s 
eart is glad. Apollo is made known by the dread 
langing of his silver bow; the lame Hephzstus hobbles 
bout to dispense the nectar amid the unquenchable 
ughter of the blessed gods. Upon their hinges groan 





62 THE HOMERIC THEOLOGY 


the gates of heaven whereof the Hours are the warders 
to whom are committed great Heaven and Olympus 
whether to throw open the thick cloud or to shut it tc 
The persuasive words of Odysseus are like the snow 
flakes of the early winter, so softly do they fall; ther 
is something awe-inspiring in every word of Achilles 
as when he opens his mouth to say: “ Hateful! to m 
as the gates of hell is he that hideth one thing in hi 
heart and uttereth another.” Is it wonderful tha 
Xenophanes called the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey? 
“the primary source of all education,” and that A®schy 
lus called his own tragedies but ‘fragments from th 
great banquet of Homer”? & | 

Whether for good or evil, Homer has been one of thi 
world’s chief teachers. Every later poet has formed hi 
poetic style more or less upon Homer’s model; wher 
the influence has been unconscious, it has been noni 
the less real. Like the Colosseum at Rome, the “Tliad’ 
and the “Odyssey” have been a quarry, from whiel 
later builders have drawn a large part of their material 
Subtract from the “ Aineid,” from the “ Divine Com 
edy,” from the “ Paradise Lost,” what of substance 0: 
expression. they indirectly or directly owe to Homel| 
and you would hardly recognize your Virgil or Dant 
or Milton. We cannot doubt that Providence ordaine) 
these poems to be a great factor in the education 0 
mankind. ; 

Hegel makes the godlike Achilles fierce but brave| 
impulsive but generous, the type and incentive of Gree 
civilization. Who can measure the influence whic! 
Homer has exerted, not only on the literature an: 
liberty of Greece, but on the literature and liberty 0 





| 


7 


| SPLENDOR OF THE HOMERIC POETRY 63 


he world! His poems have in them an inexnaustible 
fitality, and no device of criticism can tear from his 
yrow “his crown of indivisible supremacy.” Even now, 
is we look back upon the past which poetry has peopled 
vith heroic figures, we descry far in the distance, but 
till towering above the rest, the form of great Achilles, 
nd “through the music of the languid hours we hear, 
ike Ocean on a western beach, the surge and thunder 
if the Odyssey.” A single poet in a narrow sphere has 
ucceeded in catching the ear of all generations, and we 
earn the lesson that man’s influence is not measured 
y his small surroundings, and that this world and the 
rama enacted here may be the source of good to all 
he universe. There is a theory of evolution which 
wovides a place for such a wonder, as it provides for 
ther new beginnings, by the assumption of an imma- 
‘ent and divine Intelligence who works out his plan in 
aried ways, at times by sudden leaps, though commonly 
"y slow gradations. But God would seem to have given 
he death-blow to any theory of impersonal and atheistic 
volution by ordaining at the very dawn of human history 
hat the greatest of epic poets should also be the first. 

| 

) 











VIRGIL 


THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 

Rome had. conquered the world and the victors were 
crambling for the spoils. Two great civil wars natu- 
ally followed the earlier wars of conquest. In the first 
[ these civil wars, Marius and Sulla measured their 
rength against each other. After seven years of 
loodshed, Sulla entered Rome in triumph and was 
‘ade dictator just eighty-one years before Christ. 
hen followed thirty-seven years of exhaustion and 
zace, broken only by Pompey’s overthrow of Sulla’s 
bnstitution in the year 70, and Czesar’s overthrow of 
ompey and the republic in 48. | 
The second civil war began just so soon as there arose 
v0 new leaders able to continue the fight. Those 
aders were Antony and Octavian, the former Czesar’s 
gal heir, the latter Czesar’s personal heir. As in the 
‘st civil war Sulla had represented the aristocratic 
Ity against Marius, so in the second civil war Octa- 
am represented the popular party against Antony. 
1e civil wars were in part a contest of principles—the 
inciple of senatorial aristocracy on the one hand and 
€ principle of democratic rule on the other. 

But they were still more a contest of ambitious men, 
ch bent on making himself the foremost man of all 
is world. As Sulla defeated the plebeians only to 

67 


68 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


make himself dictator, so Octavian defeated the sena 
torial party only to make himself supreme. His assump- 
tion of the title of Augustus was the beginning of the 
Roman Empire, and Augustus was none the less em- 
peror because he clothed his power with the old forms 
of the republic. When, after thirteen years of anarchy 
and carnage, the battle of Actium in 31 left Caius Julius 
Cxsar Octavianus Augustus the sole authority in the 
State, the world heaved a sigh of relief, and welcome 
peace even at the cost of liberty. ‘ 

It has been said of Milton that if it had not been fo 
the civil war in England he never would have writter 
« Paradise Lost,” with its account of rebellion in heaver 
and the downfall of the prince of darkness, but woul: 
have commended himself to posterity only by sucl 
poems as “Comus” and “ The Nativity.” It must. b 
still more evident that the greatest of the Latin poet 
was the product of his time, and that both his earlie 
and his later work can be interpreted only in the igh 
of contemporaneous Roman history. 

Virgil had his birth and his education during thos 
thirty-seven years of comparative peace and exhaustio 
when the Roman world was recovering from the firs 
and was gathering strength for the second, of the gree 
civil wars. Here was a lull in the noise of battle, i 
which a pensive and imaginative nature might nouris 
dreams of Arcadian happiness and rest. The results w 
find in the “Eclogues,” and the “ Georgics,”’ whic! 
though written after the second civil war began, ar 
taking a plaintive tone from the sorrowful surrounding 
of the time, are yet a reflection and expression of tt 
quiet and seclusion of Virgil’s earlier years. After tl 


7 





Wha- rth am 
et ant 


| 


| VIRGIL A PRODUCT OF HIS TIME 69 


ivil war is ended, after the world is unified, after Au- 
ustus i is enthroned, a grander spirit of confidence takes 
jossession of the poet, and he sings in the “A=neid”’ 
he new beginning of national life, the actual reign of 
niversal peace, and the promise of perpetual dominion, 
shich fate and the gods have given to Rome. 
_ Freeman, the historian, dates the beginning of mod- 
‘a times from Czesar’s conquest of Gaul. Then first 
he Southerm races were brought into contact with the 
ands where lay the scene and the forces of future his- 
ory. But we must remember that Northern Italy was 
isalpine Gaul, and that it became an integral part of 
tome only after Virgil reached his manhood. Born in 
he center of this Northern Italy, and possibly himself 
f Celtic descent, or as others have suggested, connected 
rith the Tyrolese over the mountains, he did not be- 
ome a Roman citizen until his twentieth year. Well- 
igh a century later, a certain Roman tribune in Pales- 
ine declared that with a great sum he attained this 
reedom. In Virgil’s youth, from the country beyond 
he Po, still subject to arbitrary confiscation and parti- 
ion at the nod of the Roman master, and overrun with 
he legionaries returning from the Eastern wars, Rome 
nd Roman privilege and Roman power must have 
yomed up as the greatest things on earth. All love 
or the place of his nativity, and all hope for its future, 
dust have connected themselves in his mind with Rome. 
*he modern element in Virgil’s poetry is the product 
f these two factors—the fresh new life of Northern 
taly and the all-encompassing grasp of the imperial city 
thich had brought the whole world to its feet. 

But we must know something more of the poet’s early 


7O THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


surroundings, and something more of his personal traits,| 
The modern Lago di Garda, the greatest lake of Italy, 
fed by the snows of the Tyrolese Alps, sends out from) 
its southern extremity the last and largest affluent of 
the Po. This river is the Mincio—“ the smooth-sliding. 
Mincius’”’ of Virgil—as the Po was once Padus, and the 
lake Benacus, by name. The Mincio, not more than 
fifty miles long with all its windings, grows broad and, 
sluggish as it comes down into the plains until, about) 
twelve miles above its junction with the Po, it fairly’ 
encircles the city of Mantua, whose towers and walls 
rise as from an island in the midst of the swampy and 
reedy lagoons of the lakelike river. 

Mantua has until recently been one of the most for- 
midable fortresses in Europe. Sixty miles west: from 
Venice, seventy southeast from Milan, eighty northwest 
from Florence, ninety northeast from Genoa, and one! 
hundred and eighty northwest from Rome, the city 
holds a strategic position that is commanding, as both 
Napoleon I. and Napoleon III. well knew. Here Giulio) 
Romano built for the Gonzagas his Palazzo del Te, with: 
its Sala det Giganitt, or Hall of the Giants, where, by a| 
combination of mechanical with artistic devices, as one! 
describes it, “the rout of the Titans, still contending with| 
artillery of uptorn rocks against the pursuit and thunder-) 
bolts of Jove, appears to rush downward on the spec-} 
tator.” In the city of Mantua, Sordello, the precursor 
of Dante and the hero of Browning’s mysterious story,| 
was born and sang. And in the same city, or on the 
hilly slopes not far away, a greater than Sordello, the 
precursor of modern poetry and civilization, the poet| 
of Rome, the most complete literary representative of 





| VIRGIL'S PERSONAL TRAITS 71 
ne Latin race, and the best-read poet of all time, was 
om also. 

It was seventy years before Christ when Virgil first 
aw the light. He was a shy and gentle spirit, sober 
ad unworldly, diffident of his own powers, ‘modest even 
) rusticity in his manner, melancholy, yet kindly in 
smper. He could never arrange his toga to please 
ien of fashion, and he always wore shoes too large for 
is feet. Virgil never married ; he was accessible only 
) intimate friends; he was a man of books, as Horace 
‘as a man of the world. After he had won friends and 
ume, and audiences in the theatre rose to salute him as 
1ey did Octavian, he yet stole along the streets in trepi- 
ation lest he should be recognized, and a single whisper, 
‘There goes Virgil!”’ would drive him into the next 
ouse for refuge. It is possible that his bashfulness 
ad reserve were due in part to ill health, for though 
ul and dark he is said to have been a victim to chronic 
sthma and headache. Augustus, sitting between Virgil 
ad Horace, who suffered from an affection of the eyes, 
uid jocosely that he was between sighs and tears. = 
Like many another poet, in his youth Virgil seems to 
ave known little of youthful sports. He never bore 
“ms, as Horace did under Brutus at Philippi. He was 
‘man of contemplation rather than of action. Yet he 
ispired affection. He was the friend of Mzcenas, the 
atron of art and Augustus’ great minister; he knew 
ugustus himself before Horace did, if he did not ac- 
fey make Horace known to Augustus. In an age 
hen decorous vice was almost universal, Virgil by his 
mperance and purity gained the title of Parthenias. 
. Sort of virgin sanctity seemed to envelope him. He 

















72 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


was wrapped in loftier thoughts than the men who lived 
and wrought around him. § 

It was an age of criticism and of unbelief. Heroic 
days were getting to be matter of jest, and religion was 
mostly an affair of the rabble. But Virgil saw beneatl 
the surface. He had the poet’s eye for reality. The 
heroic stirred him—he was a hero-worshiper. The mm 
admirari spirit of his time did not infect him. He say 
that men live by admiration, hope, and love. So he 
tried to combine the later science with the primitiv 
faith, to bring back the age to a belief in the higher 
powers, to inspire in a generation that was self-seeking 
and partisan some sense of the greatness of the State, ol 
the duty of patriotism, of the dignity of labor, of the 
value of peace; in short, he would make Rome sec 1 
by investing public virtue with religious sanctions. | 

The father of Virgil, the well-to-do proprietor of ar 
extensive farm, though not himself a man of education; 
seems to have spared no expense or pains in the edu “a 
tion of his son, accompanying him at the age of sixteer 
to Cremona, as the father of Horace accompanied his 
son to Rome. Virgil had probably read Hon 


} 


Italy was at this time especially noted for its study © 
Greek. At the age of eighteen we find him in training 


raphers. Science of all sorts attracts him. Like every 
great poet, he masters the learning of his time. 01 
initiates him into the secrets of philosophy, to such ex 
tent that at one time he vows to devote his life to abi 
stract thought ; and, in many subsequent hours of die 
pondency over what seems to him his ill success in hi 


7 


| 


| THE EDUCATION OF THE POET 73 


real vocation, he regrets that he did not fulfill his early 
vow. Even to the end of his days his love for philos- 
‘ophy never leaves him, and both Plato and Epicurus 
‘seem to speak again in portions of his verse. 
| But to Virgil, dulces ante omnia Muse. To poetry 
the early consecrates himself. He has the sense of a 
mission. He'sets himself as deliberately to become a 
‘poet as Cicero sets himself to become an orator. The 
labor of years seems short, for the love he has to the 
Muse. Seven years he gives to the composition of his 
first poem; seven years to the second; ten years to the 
third ; and then he wishes to destroy this third, because, 
| sooth, his life is too short to furnish the three addi- 
tional years needed to complete it. So, revolving long 
als several themes and working them over and over be- 
‘ore he gives them to the public eye, he at last produces 
works of such incomparable artistic excellence that the 
world will not willingly let them die—indeed, they 
seem endowed with an inherent immortality. 

If other things are equal, poetry lives in proportion 
0 the perfection of its artistic form. As the produc- 
tons of the poet are borne downward on the stream of 
ime, those which have angularities of structure are 
‘aught and stopped upon their way—only the rounded 
nd innately beautiful pass by all obstacles and sail on 
0 the ocean of eternal fame. And Virgil was pre-emi- 
‘ently the artist. He, perhaps, more fully than any 
ther of the sons of men, had the literary instinct, the 
iscernment of form. Not so much a creator as a 
haper of material, he regarded thought as a means of 
roducing literary effects. 

He was a thetorical poet, if the phrase be permissi- 


a 





~ 



















74 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


ble. But as the true rhetorician knows how to choose 
great themes, because only great themes will bear the 
richest garb, so Virgil never wastes his gifts on empty, 
words. Beginning with lighter subjects, probably be: 
cause he seems to himself more equal to them, he gives| 
the maturity of his powers to the greatest subject pos: 
sible to his time,—he celebrates the rise of Rome’s po: 
litical dominion; and, by linking her present grandeur 
to the heroic past, he blends patriotism and piety to: 
gether. And “the silent spells held in those haunted) 
syllables”” have done more than any other single in 
fluence to give a humane and gracious aspect to the hard- 
ness and sordidness of Roman life. Latin before the 
Christian era would seem the language of a heartless’ 
race, and Rome would seem only incarnate power and 
law, if it were not for the sweetness and pathos of 
Virgil. | 

In this matter of artistic form Virgil was an origi 
nator. He carried the music of words to a higher per 
fection than it had ever reached before. Other Latin} 
poets had preceded him, but in their hands the strength 
of the language had hardly been tamed—it was sono 
rous, but it was harsh; it had majesty, but it lacked! 
melody. Ennius, the Calabrian, was a half-Greek, and 
he aimed to reproduce in Latin the Homeric hexameters | 
but Ennius, though he had a lofty genius, was deficient) 
in art, and it was left to Virgil to make that verse “ the 
noblest metre ever molded by the lips of man.’ En 
nius died just a century before Virgil was born. He 
was the father of Latin poetry. His “ Annals,” a ch 
rious mixture of history and song, unquestionably fur 
nished Wirgil not only with his metre, but with the 


| 
| THE GREATEST OF IMITATORS 75 


} 


." of his great epic—the origin, greatness, and des- 
‘iny of Rome. Whole lines from Ennius, indeed, are 
said to remain embedded in the “Atneid,” and to give 
wcehaic simplicity and force to portions of Virgil’s poem. 
Lucretius was born 100 p. c., while Virgil was born 
n 70. Catullus preceded Virgil only fifteen years, 
30th Lucretius and Catullus were in the zenith of their 
ame during the years when Virgil was getting his train- 
ng. He was profoundly influenced by both of them. 
aucretius was the most original and profound thinker of 
he Roman race. His doctrines of the uniformity of 
‘ature and the reign of law became a part of Virgil’s 
ystem of thought, while Virgil, unlike Lucretius, con- 
tinued to believe in a will of the gods which expressed 
‘self in nature and molded the wills of men. From 
wucretius, moreover, Virgil caught an impassioned ear- 
estness, a condensation and vividness of expression, 
‘hich constitute one of the most marked characteristics 
£ his verse. 
_Catullus furnished Virgil with an example of sweet 
idness and graceful melancholy ; but the later poet im- 
‘oves upon the tender cadences and the pathetic sim- 
‘icity of his predecessor, by adding to them dignified 
finement and just bounds. To put it all ina word, 
irgil has absorbed in himself and has combined into one 
| the great merits of the Roman poets that preceded 
m. 
If Virgil had contented himself with drinking in and 
: the general characteristics of the earlier 
iets, no fault could ever have been found with him. 
_ like Milton, he had recalled without copying, he 
yuld have had only praise. But Virgil is the greatest 







76 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE ' 


of imitators. Whatever suits his purpose, whether in 
Greek or Latin verse, he appropriates without a qualm’ 
of conscience, and with an air of happy self-compla. 
cency. True it is that whatever he touches he adorns, 
When he was charged with using Homer's similes as if 
they were his own, he merely replied: “Only the strong 
can wield the club of Hercules.” He has made others’ 
work his own so perfectly that what is original with 
him can hardly be distinguished from what he has ap: 
propriated. So Moliere said boldly: “I take my prop 
erty wherever I find it.” Even in Shakespeare we have 
a somewhat similar phenomenon. Plot and incident 
thought and phrase, our greatest poet often borrows 
with perfect unconcern. His early dramas are appar 
ently only others’ tragedies made over, but made over St 
wonderfully that even their original authors had mort 
reason for admiration than for complaint. qi 
Virgil is no plagiarist in the ordinary sense. As Dr 
Wilkinson has well said, he looked upon Homer and thi 
elder poets, both of Greece and Rome, as a great treas 
ure-house, like that of nature itself. He does not seel 
to conceal his indebtedness—he rather desires it to b 
recognized. Like the Spartans, he would have us ac 
mire the art with which he steals. Just as Charle 
Sumner sometimes introduced into his speeches imite 
tions of noble passages from Demosthenes, and wa 
only delighted when you noticed and praised them as, 
proof of his scholarship and taste, so Virgil would onl 
have felt complimented if you had pointed out how i 
geniously he had made his own poems an anthology ‘ 
all the poets that had gone before him. An echo, sa) 
Miss Wedgewood, may be sweeter than the sound ‘thi 


| PROGRESS IN HIS WORK oe 


woke it, and we may be thankful that Virgil has 
Mhocd down to our time a thousand voices of the past 
that would otherwise be lost. 

| We may say something more about this matter of 
wiginality, after we have considered what Virgil actually 
vrote. “As we have already intimated, there was pro- 
sress in his work, corresponding to the breadth of his 
*xperience and the maturity of his powers. As we 
hink of the “Eclogues,” the “Georgics,” and the 
‘Aineid ”’ succeeding one another, first the graceful 
yastorals, secondly the didactics of industry, thirdly the 
‘reat political epic, we are reminded of Tennyson— 
he linked sweetness and indecisive touch of his youth- 
ul poems such as, “ Airy, fairy Lilian,” the philosophic 
lepth and moral energy of his manlier work in “ In Me- 
noriam,” and the broad freedom and epic swing of his 
ater “Idylls of the King.” 

The earliest work of Virgil was naturally the « Ec- 
ogues.” He had been dispossessed of his country 
‘ome by Czesar’s veterans. But Pollio, the Roman gov- 
‘mor of the district beyond the Po, had introduced him 
o Augustus, had interceded for him, and had secured 
‘decree of restoration. When he went to take his es- 


ate however, he found that de jure ownership was one 





hing, and de facto ownership was another. The old 
oldier in possession attacked him with such passion and 
igor that Virgil was forced to swim the Mincio to save 
is life. It is doubtful whether he ever really recovered 
he farm. Some say that Augustus preferred to permit 
Js legionary to retain what he had so stoutly defended, 
nd that Virgil was compensated in some other way, 
ossibly by the gift of a residence in Naples. 


78 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


In the city and not in the country the “ Eclogues” 
were probably written. Blessings brighten as they take 
their flight, and most poetry in praise of country life is 
written in the town. Shut out from his home, a thou 
sand sweet illusions gather about the memory of it, 
The poet feels the tender grace of a day that is dead. 
Tityrus, who had worked the farm on shares and hac 
enabled Virgil of old time to play the gentleman farmei 
while he gave his thoughts to poetry, is now exalte¢ 
into an Arcadian shepherd. The tending of flocks is 
the only real work of life; love-making and contests ol 
verse and song are its solace and delights. 

That such a poem could have been published in the 
year 37 before Christ, in the midst of the second great 
civil war, shows not only the idealizing powers of the 
true poet, but also the large fruitage of Virgil’s previous 
years of calm. There is a xaiveté and a liquid flow te 
the “Eclogues”’ which witness to the rise of a new 
force in literature. Pollio is said to have pressed the 
poet to the writing of them, and Theocritus is said t¢ 
have furnished the model and the inspiration. But ne 
one who has in imagination reclined with the writer sa 
tegmine fagi can ever banish from his mind the delight 
ful freshness of the verse, the charm of the Italiar 
landscape which pervades it, and the impression of Vir 
gil’s wonderful love for nature. Nature seems actually 
to live and speak. She mourns for the dead Ceesar, as 
in Greek poetry she mourned for the dead Daphnis 
“In the last Eclogue,” as another has said, “all the 
gods of Arcady come to console the poet when hi 
faithless lady has forsaken him to follow his rival to the 
wars. This passage suggested the august procession 0 





| THE ‘‘GEORGICS”’ OF VIRGIL 79 


he superhuman mourners of Lycidas, which in its turn 
uggested to Shelley the splendid fragment of Adonais.” 
| In the “Georgics,” published in 30 or 29 B.C., after 
he great victory of Actium had made Augustus sole 
uler of the Roman world, we have a more sober and 
ofty poem, whose temper of chastened hope and serene 
adeavor, to use the phrase of Prof, Sellar, befits the 


° 7 ° 
me of settlement. The word ‘“‘Georgics” might be 


anslated “Field-work.” It is a glorification of indus- 
y. The country is not now the scene of perpetual 
oliday, as it was in the “ Eclogues.” Work is to be 
one, and the four sorts of work give their themes to 
te four books, which successively treat of tillage, trees, 
erds, and bees. Here too, Virgil had his model, and 
ie model was Hesiod’s “Works and Days.” He had 
Is prompter also; for Maecenas, the generous patron and 
icourager of timid genius, urged the writing of them. 

There was reason enough for the advice. The long 
urs had been times when regular government was 
most suspended. Rapine and corruption had stalked 


i 


| the track of the advancing armies. There was danger 


at the old virtues of the republic would be buried in 
e republic's grave. What could arrest the decay of 
bman life? Nothing but a revival of the principles 
nich at the first had made Rome great. Industry, 
igality,- simplicity, love of home, and reverence for 
v—these must take the place of strife and luxury, of 
abition and greed. With a true poet’s insight and 
ith a true patriot’s hope, Virgil seems to have risen to 
= occasion. He clothes with a halo of imagination 
d invests with a tender beauty all the homeliest details 


/ country labor and country life. The “Georgics” 


80 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


' would be the greatest of didactic poems if they were 
meant to be a didactic poem at all. But this is a mis, 
taken notion; they were never intended to answer for a 
book of instruction to the farmer. Their object rather 
was to elevate men’s conceptions of the arts of peace, 
to dignify humble toil, to teach the love of country, tc 
inspire reverence for nature’s laws. : 
These poems give us, more plainly than any others 
Virgil's ideas about nature and about government. Na 
ture to him means universal law. The same authorit 
which in the “A2neid” appears as Fate, appears in the 
«Georgics” as Nature. “Thus Nature,” he says, “a 
first imposed these laws, these eternal ordinances, wher 
Deucalion first cast stones in an empty world, whenet 
the hard race of men arose.” But Nature, to Virgil’ 
mind, does not exclude intelligence, or prevent the cari 
and purpose of the gods. Hear him once again: “In 
cessant labor conquers all things”; “for gods ther 
are”; “Jove hurls the lightning”; «therefore venerat: 
the gods’; “may they now save the Saviour of th 
State!” | ‘f 
And so Virgil’s doctrine of divine government lead 
to his doctrine of human government. That too ha 
divine sanctions, Augustus, who had pacified the worl 
and saved the State, was the very embodiment at one 
of the will of the gods and of eternal law. -It is nc 
necessary to regard Virgil as a mere court poet, wh 
flatters Augustus as a matter of trade. Nor was th 
deification of the emperor a piece of sycophancy. Pe 
verse and idolatrous though it was, it was still in larg 
part, as I shall hope to show, the blind exaggerati¢ 
of a noble sentiment—the sentiment of loyalty and! 
. 


a 





| THE “‘ ZNEID”’ OF VIRGIL SI 


leverence for divinely appointed powers. As the He. 
ews of old called human judges “gods,” because they 
vere appointed by God to stand in his place and admin- 
ster justice in his name, so the apotheosis of the Cxesars 
nd Virgil’s declaration that Augustus would be exalted 
9 heaven, as a new star filling the gap between the 
Jirgin and the Scales, were in some degree a poetical 
2cognition of the fact that the powers that be are 
rdained of God, and that his faithfy] representatives 
qall partake of God’s own immortality. 

_ There is a promise in the “Georgics” which indicates 
1€ consciousness in Virgil’s mind that the time was 
ear when he could venture upon a larger task than any 
2 had yet achieved. He declares that he wil] yet wed 
wesar’s glories to an epic strain. The « Afneid” is the 
ilfillment of that promise. Ten years of work he spent 
bon it. In the “Eclogues” he had followed in the 
flack of Theocritus; in the “Georgics” he had imitated 
lesiod; now in his last great poem he mounts higher, 
id aspires to produce a work like those of Homer. 
The “ Aineid” indeed is intended to be an « Odyssey”’ 
‘dan “Tliad” in one, the first six books with the wan- 
‘rings of 4ineas aiming to be an “Odyssey,” and the 
st six books, with their battles on land, aiming to be an 
liad.” The hero, however, as befits the unity of the 
ic, is in both halves of the story the same, the pious 
neas; and the great object of the poem is to show 
w the universal empire of Rome, which the gods had 
fe and Fate had decreed, was first established on 
* Italian shores. Virgil will write a poem that reflects 
E genius and the destiny of the Latin race; he will 
mnify the history of Rome by linking it to the heroes 

F 





















82 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


of antiquity and the counsels of heaven ; he will clotk 4 
his theme with all the splendors of legend and song; he 
will reproduce the Homeric poems in Italy; he wil 
himself be the Homer of Rome. 
How fully this magnificent project was realized we 
have now to inquire. There seems every reason to be 
lieve that, till within a few hours of his death, he 3 
hopeful of accomplishing his task. In the year I9 B, 
he read to Augustus and to Octavia, the sister of Au | 
gustus, the second book of the poem with its accot 
of the destruction of Troy, the fourth book with it: 
tragic story of Dido, and the sixth book with its descrip 
tion of AEneas’s descent into the underworld. It is sai 
that when Octavia heard the splendid eulogy upon he 
son, the dead Marcellus, the mother’s heart within he 
gave way; she fainted both for grief and joy; and sh 
revived to make the poet glad with a great gift of gold. 
But the “/Eneid” was not yet ready to leave th 
author’s hands. The whole poem lacked revision sak 
the latter part especially there were lines still incom 
plete; Virgil counted three more years as necessary t 
finish his work. He set out for Athens, in order on th 
voyage to get the local color needed for his descriptio 
of the wanderings of Atneas. At the capital of Greec 
he met Augustus. The emperor persuaded Virgil t 
return with him to Italy. The burning sun of Megal 
made him ill. He continued his voyage notwithstam( 
ing. At Brundisium he died, and he was buried é 
Naples. | 
All the great Latin poets died young. Neither Catu 

lus nor Lucretius reached middle age. Virgil, when? 
died, had just passed it, for he was fifty-one, He die 


| 


| VIRGIL COMPARED WITH HOMER 83 


Jespondent, because he thought his work undone. He 
regged that the “ A‘neid,” since he could not complete 
t, might be burned; he called it a piece of lunacy that 
te ever consented to undertake so great a task; he 
valued the “Georgics” more highly, because they were 
vithin the compass of his powers. So Milton thought 
ds ‘Paradise Regained,” as respected its subject, a 
‘eater poem than his “ Paradise Lost.” 

It is well for us that Virgil’s dying injunctions were 
‘ot carried out. Augustus knew too well the poetical 
nd political value of the «AEneid” to permit it to be 
estroyed. Instead of burning it, he ordered it to be 
lost carefully preserved; he commanded that it should 
e neither amended, added to, nor altered, in any way ; 
irough his influence it gained at once a circulation and 
ime entirely unexampled in ancient times. It remains 
1€ most complete picture of the Roman mind at its 
ighest elevation. It is the noblest_contribution—to pure 
cerature that has ever been made by the Latin race. 
“And yet we must not rate Virgil too high. Among 
acient poets he is the second, not the first. ‘/e must 
ant that he is not a Homer. For while Virgil has 
(lent—prodigious talent, Homer has genius. And the 
ference between the two is this: Genius is spontane- 
1s, unconscious, free from the thought of self, working 
bm an inner impulse that makes labor both a necessity 
ida delight. Talent, on the other hand, works with 
lf-consciousness and effort. Virgil has prodigious 
of Whatever labor and skill can do, he accom- 
Shes. But the vivida vis, the creative power, the 
iginal insight into the heart of things, he has not, as 
omer has, 

























84 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


Virgil does not set before us great characters, as 
Homer does. Achilles and Ulysses, Homer's heroes 
are creations so distinct and yet so natural, that the pas 
sionate courage of the one and the wily wisdom of th 
other are almost historical realities to us. But it is 0 
so with the hero of Virgil’s poem. A®neas is more of 
saint than a hero, more of a monk than a warrio1 
Saints are not necessarily uninteresting, but pl 
ZEneas hardly excites in us a ripple of enthusiasm 
Even his saintship is not decided, for everything seems, 
right to him that will further his interest. | 

If Virgil has given us any wholly original character, 
*t is that of Dido. Her figure is lifelike and complete 
The gradual rise of her fatal passion for fEneas, and hi 
throwing away of life when she finds herself abandone 
have in them more of the spirit of modern romance thé 
can be found in all classical literature besides. 
humilis mulier—there is nothing small about her gr 
and nothing so becomes her in her life as the grand ail 
with which she leaves it: . 


My life is lived, and I have played 
The part that fortune gave, 

And now I pass, a queenly shade, 
Majestic to the grave. 


And yet it is said that Apollonius Rhodius furnish 
Virgil with the outline of this picture of Dido. 
and even Homer had his predecessors. There we 
brave men before Agamemnon, and there were dou ls 
less poets before Homer. To all men of genius it ¢ 
be said: «Other men labored, and ye have entered imt 
their labors.” So the greatest literary roduc y 


| 
| ARTISTIC RATHER THAN SPONTANEOUS 85 
| 


Ul the ages are inextricably intertwined with one an. 
ther. Milton could never have written if Dante had 
ot gone before; Dante presupposes Virgil; Virgil 
vould have been impossible without Homer; Homer 
uumself was probably the interpreter and unifier of a 
vhole cycle of rhapsodists who glimmered like stars in 
he early morning of poetry before his own great epic 
un had risen. 

Still it is true that the power to set forth great per- 
onalities belongs to Homer in far larger measure than 
2 Virgil. Homer can use his materials creatively, and 
ut of them can fashion new forms, as Virgil cannot. 
‘he powerful invention, the dramatic instinct, the in- 
ght into character, which belong to the greatest poetry, 
re lacking in Virgil’s work. The Germans distinguish 
tween the Waturepos and the Kunstepos, between the 
vic poetry that is spontaneous and the epic poetry that 
rings from art. While Virgil gives the best specimen 
the one, Homer must evermore be the noblest ex- 
nple of the other, 

The interest of the “« Aneid,” unlike that of the 
Odyssey”’ or the “Iliad,” is not so much in the main 
Ory as in the episodes. The former poem is much 
ore capable of partition. It may be doubted indeed 
qether Augustus and Virgil might not better have 
mpromised matters by burning the last six books of 
e “neid” while the first six were preserved. No 
vision could ever have turned those last six into an 
liad.” In spite of the fact that Dante seems most 
oved by the closing scenes of the poem, and in spite 
the fact that the Roman and imperial element is 
fonger in the last half than in the first, it still is true 


86 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 

















that Virgil’s literary fame would have been greater if 
that last half had not been written. This Latin Homer 
begins to nod when he gets half way through his task, | 

Yet Turnus, a character of much more heroic fibre 
than AZneas, would be lost to us if the last six books 
were lost, and the noblest type of Latin chivalry with 
him. How much we should lose if we lost the episode 
of Camilla, the virgin warrior, the Amazonian queen, 
whose onset is like the wind: 


Nay, she could fly o’er fields of grain 
Nor crush in flight the tapering wheat ; 
Or skim the surface of the main, 
Nor let the billows touch her feet. 


Macaulay, in his “ Lays of Ancient Rome,” has no more 
effective couplet than that in which he describes the 
rush of another army, that moves 


Like swift Camilla o’er the corn, 
Camilla o’ er the main. 


And how could we part with that exquisite episode 
of Nisus and Euryalus, who occupy in ancient poetry th 
place which Damon and Pythias occupy in ancien 
prose? Here one noble youth dies to save another: 


Love for his friend too freely shown, 
This was his crime, and this alone. 


It is the heathen confirmation of Paul’s words: “ For 
a good man some would even dare to die.” But Vi 
witnesses to “the rarity of this human charity,” 
predicting the immortality of fame which he will give it 
in his poem ; | 


| VIRGIL’S SPECIAL MERITS 37 


| Blest pair ! if aught my verse avail, 

| No day shall make your memory fail 
| From off the heart of time, 

While Capitol abides in place, 

The mansion of the Acnean race, 
And throned upon that moveless base 


| Rome's father sits sublime. 


| Yet in spite of these brilliant and pathetic episodes, 
nd the great constructive skill which Virgil has shown 
1 weaving them into his story, the “ Aineid”’ has devel- 
ped passions rather than created persons, and in read- 
\g it we get no such impression of sustained and ma- 
‘stic power, as is made upon us when we enter the 
aarmed circle of Homer. 

| When we have said this, however, we have said the 
ost that can be said in disparagement of Virgil. He 
as merits of his own which Homer cannot equal, sim- 
ly because Homer was born too early in human his- 
ry. In all that pertains to moral earnestness, to re- 
hement of taste, and to human sympathy, Virgil is 
(perior to Homer. Certain historians of Latin litera- 
re complain that Virgil has always a divided mind: 
s spirit belonged to the ages of faith, and yet he 
ught to reconcile that faith with science. Let us 
ther say that Virgil takes the naive and unquestioning 
liefs of Homer and turns them into rational convic- 
ms, adds to them the knowledge of a later day, 
»thes them with the very perfection of literary work- 
Anship, interprets them to the new age, and hands 
ie down to posterity. 

Virgil feels the mystery of the unseen world more 
an Homer does ; he cannot like Homer talk sportively 


838 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


| 
) 


/of the gods. With a deeper reverence, he has a deeper, 
sense of justice; he believes more in moral law ; con, 
science and sin are greater realities to him; the idea of, 
sacrifice is more fully developed ; the offerings to the gods, 
are both propitiatory and vicarious: wxum pro mull 
dabitur caput. Poet as he is of the Roman Empire, 

and believer as he is in its divine mission to embrace 
the world, he is notwithstanding conscious of the crimes 
that have marked those hideous years of foreign com. 
quest and of internal strife; he fears divine judgment; 

he counsels piety anda return to the ways of virtue 
and peace. So it is not without a meaning that his 
hero is the pious Atneas—pious, not only toward the 
gods, but toward his father and his race. The mission 
of AEneas is to bring the Trojan gods to Italy, and tc 
find for them a lasting home. 

All this is a distinct advance on Homer. Virgil has 
sounded depths in the human soul that Homer knew 
not of. Neither courage nor adventure can for Virgi, 
any longer give sufficient charm to character. The true 
man is one who identifies himself with institutions, anc 
builds his life into the life of his time. In both the 
“Iliad” and the “ Odyssey,” the interest is chiefly pen 
sonal; the author is not Seen) on the side of the 
Greeks. But, in the “Eneid,” the interest is chiefly 
national; Virgil is always and everywhere on the sid: 
of Rome. He makes fidelity to Rome a sort of re 
ligion. He clothes the Empire with an imaginativ’ 
halo that impressed men’s minds for ages after. | 

It is certain that the Roman people would never havi 
endured the rule of such monsters of cruelty and Ii 
cense as Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, and Domitian, if 4 








| THE APOTHEOSIS OF AUGUSTUS 89 


Empire had not seemed to be the manifestation in hu- 
nan affairs of invisible powers, and the emperor him- 
self to be in some sort divine. Inthe apotheosis of the 
2mperors, accompanied as it was by temples and sacri- 
ices and worship in their honor, we have indeed a most 
convincing proof of man’s forgetfulness of the true 
50d and of his disposition to worship and serve the 
‘reature more than the Creator. Though the Hebrews 
alled their judges “gods,” because they were God’s 
epresentatives, they never identified them with God, or 
alled them immortal, or paid them worship. These 
ery judges were told that they should die like men, 
nd they were bidden to fall down in worship before Je- 
iovah. The very climax of heathen sacrilege and idol- 
try was thought to be reached when the images of the 
mperor which the Roman legions carried upon their 
tandards underneath their eagles of bronze or silver, 
nd which every soldier of the legion was required to 
forship, were set up in the holy place of the temple 
tthe final siege of Jerusalem; that was “the abomi- 
ation of desolation.” 

But Virgil lived in the times of ignorance, which God 
inked at, and which we ought to wink at too. The 
ords deus and divus did not mean so much then as 
rey mean to us. In Homer the Manes of the de- 
arted had been invoked in prayer; in Virgil’s time 
1ese Manes were commonly called avz, or divine. It 
‘as not so great a thing to be a god, when popular be- 
iz held that there were many gods, instead of one. 
-half-pantheistic confounding of the world with God 
ad made it easy to regard the actual ruler of the 
orld as divinity made visible. 


| 


go THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE | 


Alexander the Great had claimed not only a divin: 
parentage, but also a divine nature, and had sent an or 
der to the Republic of Greece to recognize his divinity, 
The answer of the Lacedemonians shows just hoy 
much meaning they attached to it. “ Since Alexande 
desires to be a god,” they said, “let him be one!” S| 
among the Romans, Romulus had been deified, ani 
Julius Czesar after his death had been similarly exalted 
Virgil applied all this to Augustus, even before a 
earthly life had ended. He invested the Roman Em 
pire with divine sanctions. It is doubtful whether th 
existence of that Empire in form at least until 1 80€ 
when the last Roman emperor, Francis, king of Ge 
many, permitted it to die, can be explained without tak 
ing into account the influence of Virgil. i 

In thus making the motives of his epic a larger justic 
and a larger humanity, Virgil did not depress the ton 
of poetry, he only enlarged its sphere. So he has bee 
truly called a precursor of modern civilization. Het 
the most feminine of all the great poets; he first ac 
knowledges and does reverence to the feminine in tru 
manhood. Courtesy, pity, love, sympathy with misi®} 
tune, resignation in suffering, have almost no place i 
the “Iliad,” but they are marked traits in the principé 
characters of the “ Aéneid.” Triumph in defeat, suc 
cess in apparent failure, the judging of life not by whe 
it accomplishes but what it aims at, these ideas, of whic 
Robert Browning is the great moderr representa 
are already hinted at by Virgil. 

Homer has a joy in battle; he delights to chronil 
the most ghastly wounds ; compassion to a fallen foe h 
regards as only weakness. Of Zeus he sings: 









a mal 


-VIRGIL’S THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OI 


part from the rest he sate, and to fill his eyes was fain, 
‘ith the gleam of the brass and the fate of the slayers and them 
that were slain. 


irgil too, out of deference to Homer, gives us more 
ian one battle scene. But his heart is evidently not in 
_ Touches of pathos and of pity light up the cloud of 
ar, and the interest lies, not so much in the bloodshed, 
In the tender emotions that mitigate its ferocity. 
‘hen Pallas slays the twin sons of Danaus, as a re- 
ewer has pointed out, Virgil thinks of their parents, 
10, “sore perplexed, each for the other took, nor 
shed the sweet uncertainty resolved.” When A=neas 
tys Lausus, his weapon “rent the vest his mother’s 
nd had broidered o’er with gold.” Virgil has pity for 
e vanquished and the sorrowful. He thinks it worth 
3 while to justify his hero’s desertion of Dido by the 
‘mm compulsion of fate, and to recompense the love- 
nm queen by reuniting her to her husband in the world 
shades. 

Here, indeed, is another mark of theological progress. 

omer punishes the bad in Hades, but he gives only the 
ntest intimations that there are rewards for the good. 

rgil believes in an Elysium: 


Here sees he the illustrious dead 

Who fighting for their country bled ; 
Priests, who while earthly life remained 
Preserved that life unsoiled, unstained ; 
Blest bards, transparent souls and clear, 
Whose song was worthy Phcebus’ ear ; 
Inventors, who by arts refined 

The common life of human kind, 

With all who grateful memory won 

By services to others done: 


92 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


A goodly brotherhood, bedight a 
With coronals of virgin white. 


Virgil is an imitator of Homer, but Dante was almoj 
equally an imitator of Virgil. Each improved upon h 
predecessor, while he drew without stint from his store 
Dante does well in the “Inferno” to take Virgil for h 
guide, for Virgil had mapped out the ground for hi 
long before. He copies from Virgil the approach ( 
night in the underworld : ; 


Another sun and stars they know, 
That shine like ours, but shine below. 


From Virgil he gets the cue for his limbo of infants: | 


Whom portionless of life’s sweet bliss, 
From mother’s breast untimely torn, 
The black day hurried to the abyss 
And plunged in darkness soon as born. 


From Virgil he takes his hopes for those who die: 
youth : : 
Towards the ferry and the shore 
The multitudinous phantoms pour ; 
Matrons and men, and heroes dead, 
And boys and maidens yet unwed, 
And youths who funeral pyres have fed , 
Before their parents’ eye, io 
Dense as the leaves that from the treen | 
Float down when autumn first is keen, . | 
Or as the birds that thickly massed ¥ 
Fly landward from the ocean vast, | 
Driven over sea by wintry blast 
To seek a sunnier sky. 


It would almost seem as if Dante had taken fro 
Virgil his ideas of purgatorial suffering, though in fl 





— 
“af 


| THE SOUL HOLDS A HIGHER PLACE 93 


ZEneid” purgatorial suffering prepares, not for entering 
to paradise, but for returning once more to the life of 
rth. Here in Virgil is a transmigration of souls 
aich is found neither in Dante nor in Homer. Homer 
d regarded the body as more important than the soul ; 
thout the body the soul was but phantom and shadow; 
chilles had rather be a slave on earth than the mon- 
ch of all the dead. But to Virgil the soul is the 
perior thing; the body is its place of imprisonment 
dsource-.of defilement ; only when it escapes from its 
tthly prison will the caged eagle soar into its native 
. Atneas wonders that Anchises, after he had tasted 
€ repose and the liberty of Elysium, should ever de- 
‘e to return to earth. 
Evidently, Pythagoras and Plato have contributed to 
rgil’s theology quite as much as Homer has. Homer 
ts his hell far away—Ulysses has to go to the ex- 
‘mity of the immense ocean to find it. Virgil’s under- 
rld is much more accessible—the grottos of Lake 
yernus in Southern Italy, with their sulphurous odors 
d volcanic aspect, furnish gateways to it. Not only 
point of space, but in point of meaning, is Virgil’s 
ides nearer to us than Homer's. Virgil’s is the 
ides of philosophy, as well as of poetry. The spir- 
al at last overtops the physical. All souls indeed are 
t forms of an axima mundi that breathes through all 
ngs, 

Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main, 
; The moon's pale orb, the starry train, 
| Are nourished by a soul, 
: A bright intelligence, which darts 


Its influence through the several parts 
And animates the whole. 


94 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


Thence souls of men and cattle spring, 
And the gay people of the wing, 

And those strange shapes that ocean hides 
Beneath the smoothness of his tides. 

So penal sufferings they endure 

For ancient crime, to make them pure : 


All these, when centuries ten times told 
The wheel of oa tee have rolled, 


The voice laine ride far ay mide 

Calls up to Lethe’s river- side, 

That earthward they may pass once more, 
Remembering not the things before, 

And with a blind propension yearn 4 
To fleshly bodies to return. & 















I have for once, and only once, given a long specime| 
of Conington’s translation. The ballad metre, thoug. 
it is flowing, does not represent the stately sweetness c 
Virgil’s hexameters; Dante’s “ Purgatory” is the bes 
literary analogue to the Hades of the “ Atneid.” Th 

early part of the passage I have quoted has a sound ver 
like Lucretius, but the latter part witnesses to a doctrin 
of immortality and of penalty at which Lucretius scoffec 
Dante learned from. Virgil that a heathen might realiz 
the depth of the abyss into which transgression bring 
the soul, without being able to discover the way of escap 
from it. And yet we should miss one of the chief a 
pects of Virgil’s genius if we failed to consider him: 
his character as a prophet of Christianity. Toa certa 
extent Virgil did predict the way of escape, when hi 
wrote his fourth “Eclogue.” Let us remember that thi 
‘was composed a whole half-century before Christ's wor 


eal 


was accomplished, and we shall at least be struck wi 


| SOURCES OF VIRGIL’S PREDICTIONS 9 


s remarkable correspondence with the future facts and 
is equally remarkable likeness to Hebrew prophecy. 


The poet begins by calling on the muses of Sicily—that is, 
jose who have inspired the genius of Theocritus—to aid him 
yw in work higher than any he has yet attempted. A virgin is 
‘ming, and the reign of Saturn ; the earlier ages are to return. 


lle chaste Lucina, whose emblem is the moon, is invoked in be- 
lf of the babe soon to be borne. Pollio himself, to whom the 
Eclogue’’ is dedicated, shall see the opening of the glorious 
ae now foretold. Under his guidance, if any vestiges of human 
ckedness remain, they shall at least cease to cause terror to the 
ld. The coming child shall overthrow the age of iron and 
all found a golden race; he shall take on himself a divine 
ture ; he shall see heroes mingling familiarly with the gods; he 
all himself be one of them. Under his mild government men 
all recover their ancestral virtues. The timid flocks shall no 
iger fear the lion. Serpents shall perish and poisonous herbs 
lappear. From the very cradle of the babe shall spring living 
wers ; the earth everywhere shall be alike fruitful; the soil 
ull not need the harrow, nor the vine the pruning-hook ; the 
"wman shall release the ox from the yoke. Best of all, the 


ie declare that this age of peace shall endure forever, 


When Constantine recited a part of this « Eclogue ” 
ithe assembled fathers at the Council at Nice, it was 
ch the view of showing that heathenism had predicted 
own downfall, that the deliverer it looked forward to 
S nothing less than divine, and that this Desire of all 
‘ons had come. So Virgil came to be enrolled, like 
laam, among the prophets. His statue was placed 
ong them in the cathedral of Spanish Zamora in the 
ddle Ages, and he was invoked as ‘prophet of the 

tiles,” at Limoges and Rheims in France. « Sancte 
‘vate, ora pro nobis,” we hear at one time; and 
ddha is canonized as St. Josaphat at another, | 


96 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 









Whence did Virgil derive his idea of the coming de 
_liverer? Lactantius and Augustine thought him the 
organ of a prophetic inspiration which he did not himselt 
understand. But it is more probable that here, as else! 
where, Virgil was only an imitator. The Sibylline books 
had repeated the Greek representations of a golden age 
The Jews scattered among all nations after the Exile 
were a proselyting race; in every large city they hac 
their synagogues; the Roman world had been leavenec 
with their hope of a Redeemer. Virgil only echoed ¢ 
longing which, originally springing from Jewish prophecy 
and from divine inspiration, had gradually permeai 
every civilized nation. 7 
The hope of a deliverer did not come from heat Hilal 
ism. That was skeptical and hopeless rather. Cicer: 
thought the course of all things to be downward) 
Horace mentions the idea of a golden age, only as | 
dream never to be realized on earth. But Virgil had th) 
piety and the faith that could welcome truth so fa 
above men’s common thought, and could welcome it eve) 
though coming from a Jewish source. The years ¢) 
conscription and slaughter through which Rome ha 
just passed were to him a reign of terror. All that wa 
worst in the world seemed to have been uppermost} 
surely the turn of the righteous must come. This mai 
velous hope settled on the new-born or expected child ¢ 
Augustus and Scribonia, and Virgil expresses it in lar 
guage which more than anything else in classic literatur 
reminds us of Isaiah. | 
Virgil’s prophecy did not come precisely true, for th 
world’s deliverer was born, not in the consulship ( 
Pollio, as he predicted, but some forty years later. Yet h 


| LED TO A REVIVAL OF THE OLD RELIGION 97 
eligious teaching had wonderful effect. The ‘e7aneid,) 
ublished with the special sanction of Augustus, had a 
end-off, if I may use the term, such as no other of the 
yorld’s great poems ever had. We must not push 
ack into the Augustan age ideas of the fewness of 
opyists and the large price of books which belong only 
) the dark ages that came after, 
In Virgil’s time there were publishing houses at Rome 
which the new work of a poet could be put into cir- 
lation almost as quickly, though not with the same 
umber of copies, as it can be to-day. There were 
reat rooms filled with the desks of scribes; from an 
‘evated pulpit or platform the poem was dictated word 
ir word, and if need be, letter by iicitener iitymon fa 
undred copies were made at once; the scribes were 
aves, and slave labor was cheap. Martial, a century 
ter, tells us that the first book of his « Epigrams” could 
p bought for five denarii, or for less than a dollar. 
laagine, now, the rapidity with which Virgil’s « Atneid ” 
as multiplied, with all the prestige of imperial favor 
‘give it a start in the race for fame. It attained at 
ice a circulation and an influence entirely unexampled 
jancient times. It was the means of bringing about 
marked change in the beliefs of all classes of the 
oman people. 
The nature of that change will be understood if we 
mpare the times of Cicero, just before Virgil wrote, 
d the times of the Antonines, two hundred years 
er. Though Cicero had talked publicly and officially 
the gods and of immortality, he was by no means 
re of either. He wrote the “De Natura Deorum,” yet 


vately and at heart he was a skeptic. In his letters 
B 


98 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 





there are no allusions to the gods. Nor does he in hi 
letters, even when he is in greatest affliction, draw an, 
consolations from the life tocome. In “De Senectute, 
it is true, he finds the discomforts of old age relieve} 
by the anticipation of speedy reunion with lost friend: 
Yet in another place he says: “ eee this subjee 
entertain no more than conjectures.” When he read 
Plato’s argument for immortality he seems to himse 
convinced, but when he has laid down the book he find 
that all his doubts have returned. | 

Cicero is the type of his time, a time when Epicurv 
is the reigning philosopher and Lucretius is the reignin 
poet. But before two centuries have passed, Marc 
Aurelius, the type of his time also, writes letters full ¢ 
religious sentiment ; in almost every sentence he reco; 
nizes the gods; the future life gives him hope. Virgi 
more than any other single influence, brought abou 
this revival of old religion; showed how much liter: 
ture could do to change the course of human thougl 
and feeling. It showed how much literature could d. 
but it also showed how little literature could do. 
could quicken conscience; it could inspire hope; | 
could not give certainty; it could not impart lif 
Neither Virgil’s legal nor his prophetic utterances cou. 
do the work of the gospel, but they could and they did ¢ 
something in preparing the world to accept the Christie 
faith. | 

It is not wonderful that the Middle Ages came 
regard Virgil both as a saint and as a wizard. Ma, 
aster Virgilius came to be not only master of all hj 
man science—mathematics, mechanics, architecture, al 
medicine—but also master of evil spirits, conjure, 








: 


| VIRGIL AS A SAINT AND A WIZARD 99 


€cromancer, and magician. Tunison has shown that 
1ese stories are not a sort of folklore that grew up 
oontaneously in Italy. Naples, the city of Virgil’s 
ef residence, has none of them. They were the 
uit of conscious invention. They had an exclusively 
‘erary origin. They came from the North, not from 
i¢ South. We must remember that the poems of 
irgil became the school-reader of all the world. For 
neteen hundred years his influence has been con- 
uous. 

Homer was lost to the Western world for centuries— 
ily the bringing of Greek books from Constantinople, 
d the revival of Greek learning after the Crusades, 
ought back Homer to his place of power. But from 
e day that the “ AEneid”’ was given to the public until 
W, no ingenuous youth has had a liberal education 

thout being compelled to read Virgil. What Aris- 
le became in logic and philosophy, Virgil always was 

the more elementary training—the text-book of su- 

‘me authority. 

Grammarians wrote such commentaries on his works 

it, if those works should themselves be lost, every 

> could probably be recovered from their citations. 

ble ladies had their Virgil clubs, and injected mys: 

ious meanings into his words, even as now they some. 

€s deal with Robert Browning. The “ AEneid” was 

d to conjure by, and in the time of Hadrian fortunes 

€ told by the Sortes Virgiliane, or by seizing upon 

first word that presented itself ad aperturam libri, 

- as the Bible is used by some superstitious people 

ay. As the Latin language gradually was displaced 

the popular corruptions of it, it came to-be regarded 


100 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


as a mystery, both in church and school. To the vuk: 
gar, “hoc est corpus’ became “hocus-pocus.’ A mag: 
ical efficacy was attributed to learning. Friar Bacon 
and Dr. Faustus alike, when they dived too deeply inte 
science, were thought to be in league with the devil. | 

The chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth cen 
turies had no very clear ideas of the dividing line be 
tween history and fable, and they too often fed thi 
popular appetite for the marvelous with concoctions 0; 
their own imagination. Because Virgil had risen at a boun(| 
from a modest fortune to wealth and the favor of princes) 
it was inferred that something more than natural agent} 
must have been at his bidding. Because he was maste 
of all the learning of his time, the conclusion-was draw) 
that the spirits of evil instructed him. Italy, to thos; 
far-away medieval gropers, seemed a fairy-land, an’ 
classic times were the early ages of enchantment. | 

About this period, moreover, the returning Crusader} 
brought back from the East the wonderful tales of Cor 
stantinople and Cairo and Bagdad, which, a century C 
two after, took form in the “ Thousand and One Nights. 
The German, French, and English romancers wrougl 
over the same raw material with which Moslem sheik 
were entertained in the desert. The genii of the Ea. 
became the demons of the West, Virgil became a class] 
Friar Bacon and Dr. Faustus all in one, and all the stori) 
of magic art crystallized about him. | 

Like Aladdin, Virgil found a demon in a cave al 
pressed him into his service. He imprisoned famili| 
spirits in bottles, like the Arabian fisherman. i 
Naples he had a magic garden, wherein grew all mann’ 
of plants for healing and for charming men. Th 





STORY OF THE SALVATION OF ROME IOI 


garden was protected by an immovable atmosphere, as 
by a wall; and upon a bridge of air Master Virgil could 
‘pass at will, and in a moment, whithersoever he would, 
‘even to the most distant lands. Petrarch tells us that 
in his time Virgil was thought to have excavated the 
grotto of Posilippo by his spells. There was a bronze 
‘statue which he set up to watch Vesuvius and to check 
‘its eruptions. Whenever the mountain began to groan 
and to threaten the town, the statue shot an arrow at it 
and compelled it to cease its throes, or to pour forth its 
‘ashes and lava in the opposite direction. 

But Virgil’s chef-d’wuvre as a magician was the 
‘tower or palace which he constructed at Rome. As 
‘Amphion of old had, by the music of his lyre, com- 
pelled the very stones to build themselves into his city 
wall, so Virgil used his poetry with similar effect to 
Yaise an edifice for the protection of the imperial city. 
John Desborcke, the chronicler, gives the story as fol- 
lows ; 

| The emperor asked of Virgilius how that he might make Rome 
Prosper, and have many lands under them, and know when any 
land would rise against them ; and Virgilius said to the emperor : 
“Twill within short space that do.’’ And he made, upon the 
Capitolium, what was the town-house, made with carved images, 
and of stone, and called the Sa/vatio Rome ,; that is to say : This 
is the salvation of the city of Rome; and he made, in the com- 
Pass of it, all the gods, that we call idols, that were under the 
subjection of Rome ; and every one of the gods, that there were, 
had in his hand a bell ; and in the midst of the gods made he 
one god of Rome; and whensoever there was any land would 
make war against Rome, then would the gods turn their backs 
toward the god of Rome; and then would the god of the land 
that would stand up against Rome clink his bell that he hath in 
his hand, till the senators of Rome heard it; and forthwith they 


| 
| 


go there and see what land it is that will war against them, wnal 
go against them, and subdue them. : 


102 THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


i 

The tale went on to say that Virgil declared that this. 
magic tower should stand until a virgin should bear al 
son; and that, in accordance with his prophecy, it fell, 
into ruins when Christ became incarnate. It isa strike, 
ing proof of the persistence of men’s craving for the. 
marvelous, that this story of the “Salvation of Rome,” 
and of Virgil’s connection with it, should have been. 
hawked about in English chap-books so late as the be-. 
ginning of the present century, and should have died 
out of popular belief only when the Roman Empire. 
itself expired. | 

Goldwin Smith declares that the victories of Rome. 
were victories of the intellect. He regards the first 


| 


settlers at the mouth of the Tiber as a commercial’ 
rather than a warlike people, who were able to keep the. 
marauding tribes of the hills in check only by maintain~ 
ing a discipline superior to theirs. So the necessities of, 
traders gave to the Roman State its bent to military art,! 
as the necessity of harmonizing the customs of the varied 
peoples whom it subdued compelled its attention to or 
ganization and to law. Greece treated strangers as bar 
barians, and even the Greek colonies were never Greece, 
But wherever a Roman went, there Roman covercigil 
and citizenship went with him. Rome incorporated, 
every conquered people; adopted their gods; and made 
both gods and people Romans. It is this incorporation) 
and reconciliation of all nations by the decree of heaven 
under the zgis of Rome that constitutes the one greal) 
motive and subject of Virgil’s song. 

In his “Convito,’ Dante speaks of “the allegory 0! 








| 
| 
| 
| VIRGIL, THE POET OF ROME 103 
‘the ages of man, which Virgil imagined in the ‘ A2neid.’”’ 
It was not so much an allegory of the ages of man, as 
an allegory of the ages of mankind. Written when the 
people of Italy first attained the sense of complete and 
secure nationality, and the whole circle of the earth 
recognized the authority of Rome, it most fully ex- 
pressed the bounding hope of the Augustan age. 
As the victory over Persia ushered in the splendid 
triumphs of art and oratory in the time of Pericles; as 
the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the humbling of 
papal Spain was immediately followed by the culmina- 
tion of English literature in the days of great Elizabeth; 
so the unity of all mankind under Roman sway roused 
the soul of Rome’s greatest poet. After the horrors 
of civil war, no wonder that Augustus seemed to him 
the Saviour of the State. With the world subdued, no 
wonder he could believe that the Empire was peace. 
We may smile at his idealization of the Empire, and we 
may frown upon his apotheosis of the emperor, but we 
cannot deny that his great poem drew its greatness from 
some of the noblest springs of human emotion, and 
constituted an unconscious prophecy of a greater king- 
dom than Rome, and a greater King than any of the 
Ceesars. 





(x) 
AE 
< 
ay 











DANTE 


AND “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


ONCE upon a time, as the story-books would say, or, 
to speak more historically and exactly, in the year of our 
Lord eighteen hundred and eighty-six, and in the month 
of August, a little company of fairly intelligent people 
determined to put their vacation to use. The scene and 
the surroundings were propitious. We were upon the 
banks of Canandaigua Lake, the loveliest of those paral- 
lel sheets of water which so diversify the landscape of 
Central and Western New York. From the veranda 
where we assembled after breakfast, Bear Hill loomed 
up across the lake, like Vesuvius over the Bay of Naples. 
The quiet summer mornings, the shade of the great 
elms, and the deep blue sky invited us to something 
more serious than vers de société. 

Some one spoke of “The Divine Comedy,” and won- 
dered if anybody had ever read it through. It was a 
revelation, a challenge, and an admonition. Most of us 
fad read the “ Inferno,” but had been so ill-pleased with 
Dante’s Hell, that we had never cared to try his Purga- 
‘ory, or even his Paradise. But a new resolve was 
taken. We would begin and finish. Forthwith were 
produced the translations of Cary, Wright, and Long- 
ellow. Two of us knew something of Italian, and had 


with us the original poem. We brought to our help the 
107 


108 “THE DIVINE COMEDY’’ 


English version of Dr. Carlyle and Mr. Butler, with ia 
Italian original on the same page. Best of all, we read 
by way of introduction and of comment, “The Shadow 
of Dante,” by Maria Francesca Rossetti, from which 1 
take much of value in the composition of this paper. | 

An hour and a half each morning for four weeks suf: 
ficed to accomplish our task. Indeed it was no task: 
the pauses for discussion were numberless ; its beauty 
grew upon us; when we finally closed our books, the 
four weeks seemed four days for the love we bore the 
poet and the poem. I have since read the essays 0: 
James Russell Lowell and of Dean Church—the forme: 
very learned and thoughtful, though conceived from ¢ 
literary point of view; the latter strong and eloquent 
the work of a moralist and a preacher. I undertake 
now to give the condensed result in my own mind 0) 
this bit of summer study—not however without the ex 
-pectation and acknowledgment that pieces of others) 
learning will here and there shine through my writing 
as through a palimpsest. I have let my reader into the 
secret of its origin, if by any means I may tempt him 
to go and do likewise. 

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in the yea) 
1265, so that my story takes us back more than six hun 
dred years. The Middle Ages were coming to thei 
end. The Crusades had wakened Europe from thi 
sleep of centuries; the classic literature had begun t 
attract its devotees; the free cities had establishe 
themselves ; there was everywhere the stir of new polit: 
cal and religious life. But it was a time of strife. Th 
Guelphs, the party of the popes, and the Ghibellines 
the party of the emperors, were hotly contesting ever 














DANTE AND BEATRICE 109 


point of vantage in city and country ; although in Italy 
the Ghibellines were strong in the provincial districts, 
‘while the Guelphs were strong in the towns. To the 
Guelph party Dante’s family belonged. He does not 
‘appear to have been of noble birth, for he afterward 
held office ; and the constitution of Florence at the time 
forbade this to nobles. But he does appear to have been 
born to wealth ; he certainly possessed the means of the 
highest education the age could give; he was ever in 
)the front rank of his contemporaries, both in society and 
in politics. Of his youth we have but a single incident 
'—fortunately that was the most important incident of 
his life. It was his meeting with Beatrice. 

At the age of nine years he first saw the lady of his 
‘dreams. It was ata festival at the house of her father, 
\Falco Portinari. She was but a little damsel, no older 
than himself, but she was, habited in crimson, and the 
)sight of her was the awakening of his spirit. The next 
meeting of which we have record was nine years after, 
and that seems to have been a casual encounter on the 
‘street, leaving only a glance and a gentle word to be re- 
membered. We do not know that Dante ever sought 
Beatrice in marriage; she was a star apart, to be looked 
at from afar; she married another, and she died at 
twenty-four ; she probably never knew of the influence 
she exerted ; and yet, from the day of that festival at 
her father’s house, she was the ruler of Dante’s soul. 

Sense did not mingle with his passion. Beatrice be- 
came to him the symbol of all spiritual beauty. When 
he reaches paradise, he is lifted from each lower sphere 
of heaven to the next higher simply by gazing into the 
‘transparent depths of Beatrice’s eyes. ‘The thoughts 


H 

















110 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


of youth are long, long thoughts,” and the resolves then 
formed prove often the strongest resolves of a lifetime. |, 
So the loves of youth may be long, long loves. A true 
affection never dies, and the psalmist never spoke more 
truly than when he said, ‘“ Your heart shall live for- 
ever.” That meeting at the festival was not the first © 
time, nor the last time, that the sight of a little damsel | 
in pink or blue has turned the head of some great man, b 
and so has changed the face of the world. } 

I wish we could say that Dante was absolutely faith. | 
ful to the memory of Beatrice. But history and his | 
own acknowledgments are too much for us. There | 
was a little time when, possibly to distract his mind l 
after her death, he plunged into a skeptical philosophy 





and yielded to the attractions of sense. A rival, whom » 







as a woman at a window, temporarily absorbed his |. 
thoughts. But the spell could not last. Let us adapt) 
and use the lines of Tennyson : , 


Faith in womankind 
Beat with his blood, and trust in all things high 
Came easy to him, and though he tripped and fell 
He could not blind his soul with clay. 


How noble a lesson there is in the fact that the break- 
ing of the evil spell is coincident with a second vision | 
of Beatrice! As there rises before his imagination the 
fair form of his lost love, still habited in crimson as he 
had seen her so long ago, yet now invested with a purity F 
and glory that belonged to heaven rather than to earth, 
the chains of sense and of unbelief seem to fall away b 
from Dante’s soul. 


PREPARATION FOR ‘‘ THE DIVINE COMEDY” III 







| So the new life begins, of which the « Vita Nuova” is 
he history. Beatrice, who has rescued him, becomes 
o him God's angel and minister, the perfect combina- 
ion of nature and grace, the symbol and embodiment 
if that heavenly wisdom which alone can free man from 
he anguish of doubt and the degradation of sin. Hence- 
orth he identifies her with divine philosophy, and in 
oken of his renewed and perpetual allegiance to his 
rst-beloved, he writes these words: 


There appeared to me a marvelous vision, wherein I saw things 
hich made me resolve to say no more of this blessed one until I 
ould more worthily treat of her. And to come to this I study as 
auch as I can, as she knows in truth. So that if it be the pleas- 
re of Him by whom all things live that my life shall last some- 
that longer, I hope to say of her that which has never yet been 
aid of any woman. And may it then please him who is the Lord 
f lovingkindness that my soul may go to behold the glory of its 
idy ; that is, that blessed Beatrice who gloriously gazes upon the 
ice of Him who is blessed forever ! 


“The Divine Comedy” is Beatrice’s monument. It 
fas the labor of a lifetime. It was prepared for by 
rofound and extensive studies. What is true of every 
reat poet was especially true of Dante—he was master 
f all the learning of his time. It was easier then than 
ow to compass all human knowledge. Thomas Aquinas 
ad written, and from his immense “ Szmma” the poet 
ad learned theology. Aristotle furnished him with his 
hilosophy. Homer and Virgil were his masters in 
oetry. He was deeply read in history, both sacred and 
rofane. Whatever of physical science had then been 
iscovered, whatever of medicine or of law was taught 
1 the schools, all the culture that music, painting, 


f 


112 ‘THE DIVINE COMEDY” 





architecture, and sculpture could give, all these were 
Dante’s possession. y 

But more than this, he was a man among men, a cite 
zen, a diplomatist, a statesman. Grave yet eloquent, 
composed yet capable of heroic decisions, an ardent. 
lover of his country and a soldier in her defense, he had | 
that large knowledge of affairs and that experience of. 
human nature which fitted him to speak to the very 
heart of his generation, and indeed to the human heart} 
in all ages and everywhere. He had moreover the sub- 
lime self-confidence of genius. He entered unabashed 
into the company of the greatest poets, as he met them 
in the world of spirits; and, even in Florence, when it 
was proposed to send him on an embassy to Rome, he 


replied: “If I go, who remains? and if I remain, who | 
i 









goes?” 

But neither study nor political life alone would have. 
qualified him to write his great poem. It needed the. 
heavy blows of exile, poverty, and suffering to forge the 
argument of “The Divine Comedy.” In the year 1300 
Dante was elected one of the chief magistrates of Flor- 
ence, and perceiving that his native city could have no: 
peace unless the leaders of its factions were banished, 
he used his two months of brief authority to send these 
leaders beyond the borders of the State. It was a 
patriotic and unselfish act, for among them, and in 
either party, were certain of his personal friends. It} 
was abstract justice without regard to consequences, 
and when the tide turned and his enemies returned t 
power, they gave to him the same measure which he 
had meted out to them. 3 


In 1302 a heavy fine was imposed upon him, and 
: 

















. 





DANTE IN EXILE I13 


vhen he refused to pay, his entire estate was confis- 
ated, and it was decreed that if he should be found 
gain in Florence he should be burned alive. Hence. 
orth Dante became a wanderer upon the face of the 
arth. In 1310, he appears to have gone to Paris, per- 
aps to Oxford. After his return he was offered am. 
€sty, upon condition of paying fine and acknowledging 
riminality, But he scorned to enter Florence except | 
mith honor. “The means of life will not fail me,” he 
aid. ‘In any case I shall be able to gaze upon the 
un and stars, and to meditate upon the sweetest truths 
f philosophy.” 

Let us enter in imagination into the fortunes of this 
yn of Florence, her truest patriot and her greatest 
tan, cast out by an unloving mother, though every 
one of her streets and every foot of her soil were 
ucred to him as they could be to no other. He be- 
ume a Ghibelline in hope that the emperor’s coming 
ould restore just authority and would right the wrong. 
dor, and exposed to all “the slings and arrows of out- 
igeous fortune,” he wandered from one petty Ghibel- 
1€ court to another, illustrating all too well the words 
' his own prophecy : 















Thou shalt have proof how savoreth of salt 
The bread of others, and how hard a road 
The going down and up another’s stairs. 


he lines of sweetness in his youthful portrait hard- 
ued and deepened into the sad, stern countenance of 
is later years. The very dignity of his nature, that 


tbade outward complaint, threw him inward upon him- 
lf. 
H 


114 ‘“THE DIVINE COMEDY ”’ 


Seldom he smiled, and smiled in such a sort 
Asif to scorn his nature that could be moved 
To smile at anything. 



















Yet morose and despairing he never did become. As 
the outward darkness of his lot deepened about him, a | 
“light that never was on sea or land” ‘so much the 
more shone inward.” As he walked up and down1 in ‘ 
Northern Italy, leaving traditions of his sojournings ; 
connected with many a ruined castle and mountain tor- 
rent, there were opening before his vision great truths 
with regard to God and his judgments; he was gather- 
ing vast knowledge of nature and of the human heart ; 
aye, he was mapping out heaven, earth, and hell for the 
generations to come. There can be no doubt that he re-, 
garded himself as a sort of prophet. From the heav- 
enly spheres he looked down upon this earth of trial and 
sifting and saw the meaning of it: ‘| 

The threshing-floor that maketh us so proud 


To me, revolving with the eternal twins, 
Was all apparent made from hill to harbor. 


And so, revolving “The Divine Comedy” and bringill 
it into form, he passed nineteen years of sorrowful exile, 
until at last, far from home, at Ravenna, in the year I 321, 
and at the age of fifty-seven, Dante Alighieri died. @ | 

Before speaking of the great poem in detail, it will be 
desirable to say something about the end which Dante 
has in view and the means which he uses to attain it. 
The first of its hundred cantos is a sort of introduction 
to the whole, and we may well avail ourselves of the 
hints it gives us. Its first line, | 


In midway of the journey of this life, 










: ‘‘THE DIVINE COMEDY”’ A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS T15 


aas doubtless a personal reference to the history of the 
writer, and fixes the date when its composition began at 
(300, when Dante had just reached the age of thirty- 


ive, having passed half-way through the threescore 
*ears and ten allotted to man. 


_ On the first day of that new year and that new cen- 
ury, he describes himself as wandering, half asleep, 
rom the right path, and becoming entangled in the 
mzes of a dark wood. Before him rises a hill, to 
which he makes his way and up which he essays to 
limb, until he finds himself withstood and repelled in 
decession by three wild beasts, a swift leopard, a 
ging lion, and a greedy wolf. These well-nigh drive 
tm back upon the sunless plain, when suddenly 
@ becomes aware that he is not alone. A gracious 


ad majestic figure approaches and offers succour and 
onduct : 


Follow thou me, and I will be thy guide, 

And bring thee hence by an eternal place, 
Where thou shalt hearken the despairing shrieks, 
Shalt see the ancient spirits dolorous 

That each one outcries for the second death. 
And thou shalt then see those who are ‘content 
Within the fire, because they hope to come 
When that it be, unto the blessed race. 

) To whom thereafter, if thou wouldst ascend 
A soul there'll be more worthy this than I : 
Thee will I leave with her when I depart, 
Seeing that Emperor who above there rules, 
Because I was rebellious to his law, 

Wills to his city no access by me. 

In every part he sways, and there he reigns ; 
There is his city and the exalted seat— 

Oh, happy he whom thither he elects ! 





3 





116 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


It is Virgil who thus offers himself as Dante’s conduc 
tor through hell and purgatory ; it is Beatrice who has 
sent him for Dante’s deliverance, and who is to be his 
cuide through paradise after Virgil has led him through 
the two lower provinces of God’s empire. : 

Many have been the interpretations put upon th 
great poem. ‘The true interpretation is that which find: 
in it a combination of meanings. Dante himself ha: 
told us that there are four separate senses which he in 
tends his story to convey. There are the literal, thi 
allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. In Psaln 
114 : 1, we have the words, “ When Israel went out 0 
Egypt.” This, says the poet, may be taken literally, o 
the actual deliverance of God’s ancient people; or alle 
gorically, of the redemption of the world througl 
Christ ; or morally, of the rescue of the sinner fron 
the bondage of his sin; or anagogically, of the passag 
of both soul and body from the lower life of earth to th 
higher life of heaven. So from Scripture Dante illus 
trates the method of his poem. We have his own wai 
rant for beginning with the literal meaning, and the 
superadding the spiritual. : 

Nothing can be more plain than the personal elemer 
that runs through the poem; Dante’s own life an 
spiritual struggles furnish the basis for all the rest. W 
cannot be far wrong in maintaining that the beginnin 
of the poem describes Dante’s own entanglement in th 
thickets of sense and unbelief, his early efforts to mak 
his way up the mount of knowledge and virtue 
strength of his own; the demonstration of his inabilit 
to cope with the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye 
and the pride of life—thée three adversaries which lik 








| 
| 








DANTE'S PHILOSOPHY OF CIVIL SOCIETY hy 


wild beasts would drag him down; the offer and the 
ucceptance of superior aid, in order that he may know 
the truth and the truth may make him free; and then 
us gradual growth in knowledge and holiness, as one 
iter another the sins and infirmities of the soul are 
vevealed and are put beneath his feet, until at last he 
ises to communion with God and to the society of the 
1oly. In other words, and yet more briefly, «The Di- 
"ne Comedy” is an autobiographical “ Pilgrim’s Pro- 
‘ress,’ written from the point of view of the Middle 
Ages and the Romish Church. 

_ But this is only the beginning. Around and upon 
his core and foundation, is built up a wondrous sym- 
yolic structure in which Dante has sought to express his 
deas of God's relations to humanity. It has been well 
aid that the ancient epic never rose above the individ- 
ial. “Arms and the man I sing,” said Virgil. Dante 
ings, not of himself, nor of any particular man alone, 

ut of man in the largest sense: “ His subject is man, 
Ss by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he 
enders himself liable to the reward or punishment of 
istice.’’ Man, in this large sense, has two sides to his 
ature, an earthly and a heavenly, a temporal and a 
diritual. In each of these relations he needs author- 
y. God has therefore provided upon earth two rulers, 

he pope to_be his vicegerent in spiritual, the emperor 
s his vicegerent in temporal things; the former like 

ie sun giving forth the light of God’s truth directly, 

le latter like the moon reflecting that of the former ; 

ch has his sphere, and each, being directly responsible 

God, is to a certain extent independent of the other. 

here is therefore a political sense in which “The Divine 










= on i — Lae 


118 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


Comedy” must be taken, and the constant interweay. 
ing of political incident and philosophy, which has struck: 
so many as beside the purpose of the poem, is one a 
sign of its larger completeness and unity. | 

Miss Rossetti has beautifully traced the working af 
this idea into the introduction of the poem. The dark-) 
some wood is the distracted and hopeless political con-| 
dition of Italy. The hill of virtue and reason that arose 
before the mind of Dante, was the scheme of a stable. 
and righteous commonwealth. But there was no mate-| 
rial to build a city. The Guelph powers beset him.| 
Factious Florence, proud France, avaricious Rome, are 
respectively the leopard, the lion, and the wolf, that set 
themselves against all order and all progress. Dante; 
sinks back almost into despair of his country, when 
Virgil, the symbol of science and philosophy, appears for 
his deliverance, and brings him to a right understanding! 
of the divine will, so far as the light of nature can go;) 
and when that has done its utmost, divine grace, in the) 
person of Beatrice, discovers to him the very consum- | 
mation of God’s plans for the temporal good of hu- | 
manity. : i 

Whatever we may think of the details of this inter- 
pretation, there can be no doubt that in Dante’s soul) 
there had dawned the idea of a free State, as well as that | 
of afree Church. He was immeasurably grieved and) 
angered at the insane jealousies and enmities that tore. 
his country in pieces. His prose essay, “ De Monarchia,’ | 
shows that his advocacy of Ghibelline doctrine in the| 
latter half of his life, was based upon the conviction | 
that only the supremacy of the emperor could deliver: 
Italy from the wiles of the papacy and give her a strong: 


| 
j 








‘a 
a 
: 


EXPRESSES MAN'S RELATIONS TO GOD 119 


ind solid government. Italian unity and the independ- 
mee of Church and State both found their first great 
tdvocate in Dante—or rather, shall we say, first found 
serminal expression in his writings. No stronger bond 
han love for Dante has for centuries, in spite of all her 
solitical divisions, preserved a moral unity in Italy. 
And now at length even Dante’s dream of political 
mity has worked its own realization. The pen has 
yroved mightier than the sword, because it has led men 
o wield the sword in securing and in defending the 
inity of Italy. 

| So far, as to the temporal or political aim of Dante’s 
yoem, the settlement of the true principles upon which 
‘vil society should be built. This, however, is not its 
hief aim. The spiritual side of man is more important 
han this. He would set forth the nature of man as a 
ubject of God, free to obey or to disobey, and bound 
9 answer to his own conscience and to Him who made 
4m. And here we must remember that, with all 
Jante’s reverence for God’s spiritual vicegerent upon 
arth, he never fails to distinguish between the office 
nd him who held it, between the papacy and the indi- 
idual popes. 

He held loyally to Roman Catholic doctrine—indeed 
1ere was none other in his day to hold to; but he held 
p it in no slavish way. He abhorred the Seen power 
the papacy ; he regarded it as usurpation of the pre- 
dgatives of the State, treachery to the spiritual calling 
[ the vicar of God, and cause of all the divisions and 
iseries of Italy. He has denounced the pride and 
enality of many a pope, and he has put some of them, 
eels upward, in hell. We cannot think him lacking in 








120 ‘THE DIVINE COMEDY ’”’ 


courage, when we hear him calling the rulers of the 
church Antichrist : 


Your avarice o’ erwhelms the world in woe. 

To you Saint John referred, O shepherds vile, 
When she, who sits on many waters, had 
Been seen with kings her person to defile ; 

(The same, who with seven heads arose on earth 
And bore ten horns, to prove that power was hers, 
Long as her husband had delight in worth). 

Your gods ye make of silver and of gold ; 

And wherein differ from idolaters, 
Save that their god is one, yours manifold ? 

Ah, Constantine ! what evils caused to flow, 

Not thy conversion, but those fair domains 
Thou on the first rich Father didst bestow ! 











In Dante’s expositions of Scripture he has given us; 
independent judgments; widely read as he was in’ 
sacred and patristic learning, we find him ever apply- 
ing the Bible to matters of common life; as we uncon-| 
sciously get something of our theology from Milton,| 
many an educated Italian only quotes Dante when he! 
thinks he is quoting the Bible. The whole range and| 
compass of man’s spiritual being is the subject of! 
Dante’s treatment. He intended nothing less than to) 
set forth the whole process and philosophy of man’s fall 
and man’s restoration. Not simply the outward means 
for the cure of souls, but the great array of spiritual) 
agencies that work for the punishment of the lost and 
the recovery of the penitent, constitute the subject of 
his story. 

Let us put ourselves again, then, with the poet, in the 
dreary wood. The poet is only the image of humanity, 
straying away from God and miserably perishing in its 


DANTE’S SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSE I21 


4m. There is left only the voice of conscience to urge 
t up the steep hillside of knowledge and virtue, and 
his upward impulse is more than counteracted by the 
arts and devices of the great adversary. Humanity 
teeds all the help that can come from both earth and 
ieaven. God sends human teachers, and these show 
nen the nature and the consequences of their sins and 
he means of purification from them. Virgil is the 
epresentative of the highest earthly wisdom. He can 
ead us to a terrestrial paradise; but if we would pass 
yeyond, we must have a higher guide. Beatrice is 
livine science, the teaching of the Spirit, God’s highest 
aft to men. He who yields to the lower teaching shall 
lave the higher. MDante’s taking Virgil for his guide is 
ymbol of the whole race of man putting itself under 
z0d’s elementary tuition, that it may learn the truth 
vhich will deliver it from hell and lift it to heaven. 

So the poem, which has autobiography for its center, 
‘braces not only the doctrine of the State, but widens 
vut until it takes in universal humanity and the true 
elations of that humanity to God. “The Divine 
vomedy”’ is an attempt to put all theology and all phi- 
osophy into poetical form, that man may have before 
iis eyes an interpretation of the universe of things, a 
oncrete representation of eternal truth, a justification 
5 the ways of God to men. It is the loftiest concep- 
ion ever framed by any earthly poet, and the execution 
3 worthy of the theme. “The Divine Comedy”’ was 
he first Christian poem; it seems to us also to be the 
Teatest. 

So much for Dante’s aim; let usconsider now the 
ieans he used to attain it—I mean his scheme of the 


i 


i222 ‘OTHE DIVINE COMEDY” 





















universe, and the external vehicle by which he com-| 
municated his thought; or, first, his cosmology, and] 
secondly, his verse. We must remember that Dante | 
lived before Kepler; his system was not the Coperni-' 
can, but the Ptolemaic. To understand his poem with-| 
out knowing this is as impossible as it would be for a) 
schoolboy to learn geography without a map. Ptolemy 
did not hold to a flat, but to a spherical, earth; yet he 
did hold that the earth was the center of all, and that’ 
sun, moon, and stars all revolved around it. There 
were two hemispheres—an eastern hemisphere of land) 
and a western hemisphere of water. In the center of’ 
the hemisphere of land is the city of Jerusalem, dit 
rectly over the hollow pit of hell; in the center of the’ 
hemisphere of water is the island-mount of purgatory, | 
up whose steep sides all penitents must climb to’ 
heaven. : 

Neither hell nor purgatory was created where they} 
now are; this is the result of Satan’s fall. When the! 
rebel angel was cast out from heaven, his immense mass | 
and weight crushed through earth’s surface to the very’ 
center of the planet ; gravity prevented him from going | 
farther and held him there fast bound. The very sub-| 
stance of the globe fled from him in horror as he came} 
hurtling down, and with these three results: First, the’ 
great pit of hell was excavated, at the bottom of which | 
Satan lies; secondly, the waters of the eastern hemi-! 
sphere were transferred to the western, so that the east- 
ern hemisphere is now laid bare; thirdly, the portion of | 
earth’s substance displaced to form hell, since it must go’ 
somewhere, was thrust up under the ancient Eden and 
so the terrestrial Paradise was made the summit of the! 





DANTE’S SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSE 123 


yurgatorial mountain in the midst of the waste of west- 
‘m waters. Ulysses is the only mortal who has seen 
jhat mount, and there it was that he met his fate. 
fennyson’s poem “ Ulysses” is only a reminiscence of 
Jante. The mount of purgatory is therefore “exactly 
\t the antipodes of Jerusalem, and its bulk is precisely 
qual and opposite to the cavity of hell.” 
Hell and purgatory belong to this planet. Earth 
lone is the abode of sin and the place of penance. 
Sut as we leave earth and go upward we find nine sev- 
ral heavens, one above the other, each a hollow revolv- 
ag sphere, enclosing and enclosed. These are at once 
olid and transparent ; in them the planets are fixed, to 
‘ive light by day and night. First comes the heaven 
f the moon ; beyond this the heaven of Mercury; then 
he heaven of Venus; fourthly, the heaven of the sun, 
hich Dante, after the fashion of his time, regarded as 
planet revolving around the earth; fifthly, the heaven 
f Mars; sixthly, the heaven of Jupiter; seventhly, the 
eaven of Saturn; eighthly, the heaven of the fixed 
tars; ninthly, the starless, crystalline heaven, or 
-vimum Mobile, which moves most rapidly of all, and 
y sO moving communicates movement to all the rest. 
reyond all these nine heavens is a tenth, the motionless 
mpyrean of God and his saints. There the elect spirits 
all time, arranged in ranks like the rising seats of an 
mphitheatre, surround a lake of light formed by the 
sflection of the divine glory from the convex upper 
arface of the Primum Mobile. It is the Rose of the 
essed, whose petals expanding on every side are made 
p of countless intelligences, all bright with the purity 
ad the love of the highest heaven. 


124 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


Such is Dante’s scheme of the universe. Let us ask 
now about his verse. He called his work “The Com: 
edy”’; the title “Divine” was given to it by admirers 
belonging to the next generation. He tells us that the 
designation ‘‘Comedy”’ was given to it, because, though 
beginning in gloom and sorrow, it has a happy ending . 
it takes the reader through hell and purgatory, but it 
brings him to paradise. The average reader, I fear, 
does not give to Dante’s work the benefit of the poet's 
own explanation. He reads only the “Inferno,” and in- 
sists on judging the whole by this single part. Here 
the grotesque and the revolting so fasten his attention 
that he declines to proceed farther. He does not pene. 
trate to the deep philosophy of Dante’s treatment ; does 
not see that Dante’s aim is to portray the folly and the 
monstrosity of sin; does not appreciate the poet’s aim 
of making all this a contrast and a foil to the sweetness 
of penitence and the joy of the redeemed. But he who} 
has the grace and the patience to read the Purgatory, 
and the Paradise as well, will find that Dante was 
right in not calling his poem “The Divine Tragedy.” 
Dante is no pessimist. To his mind “all things work. 
together for good”’; and so his poem, which was meant: 
to be an interpretation of the universe and a philosophy: 
of history, rightly calls itself a “Comedy,” for it de 
scribes the uplifting of humanity from sin to holiness 
and from eternal sorrow to eternal joy. 

But there was still another reason for the cheerful 
title. The work is written, not in the stately and 
sonorous Latin with its classic elegance and coldness, 
but in the humble Italian of common speech, the newly 
emerging product of a new civilization, the language of, 











| 
| 
| THE ENTRANCE TO THE HELL 125 


che shop and of the home, rather than the language of 
the schools. And yet it is too much to say that this 
anguage existed before Dante wrote. Dante was 
rather its creator; for the Italian language, with all its 
sweetness and purity and beauty, the language of love, 
af poetry, of philosophy, sprang complete from Dante’s 
orain. | 

There is something almost awe-inspiring in the sua- 
Jen appearance of such a work as his, as new in its 
iterary vehicle as it was in conception and in theme. 
[t did more to fix the language of Italy than the French 
Academy ever did to fix the French, or the English 
Bible to fix the. English, tongue. Six hundred years 
ago a language was spoken in France which no com- 
mon Frenchman can understand to-day; six hundred 
years ago a language was spoken in England which no 
common Englishman can understand to-day. But 
Dante’s Italian is the Italian of modern speech. It is 
well worth while to learn a little Italian, for even a little 
will enable one to appreciate to some degree the sweet 
severity of Dante’s verse; the marvelous compression 
which never wastes a word ; the fascination of the ¢erza 
rama, or triple rhyme, whose endless reiterations seem 
ike the recurrent melody, at one time of funeral, and 
ut another time of marriage, bells. 

There is scarcely a more striking example of this fit- 
jess of phrase than in the solemn music which records 
‘he inscription over the gate of hell: 


Per me st va nella citta dolente : 
. Per me st va nell’ eterno dolore + 
Per me si va tra la perduta gente. 

| Giustizta mosse tl mio alto Fattore: 


126 “THE DIVINE COMEDY’ 


Fecemti la divina Potestate, 

La somma Sapienza e ul primo Amore. 
Dinanzt a me non fur cose create, 

St non eterne, ed to eterno duro, 
Lasctate ogni speranza, vot ch entrate / 












Let us now compare the Italian with the English, 
and mark how the liquid and intense quality of the 
original well-nigh disappears in the translation : | 


Through me ye enter the abode of woe ; 
Through me to endless sorrow are ye brought ; 
Through me amid the souls accurst ye go. 
Justice did first my lofty Maker move ; 
By Power almighty was my fabric wrought, 
By highest Wisdom and by primal Love. 
Ere I was formed, no things created were, 
Save those eternal—I eternal last : 
All hope abandon—ye who enter here ! 


The gate is ‘closed to none, being reft of all its fas-: 
tenings since the day when the Conqueror of Death, | 
fresh from the cross, forced through it his resistless) 
passage.” So Dante, following Virgil as his guide, pur-| 
sues the deep and savage pathway and enters the In | 
ferno. Let us enter with him. Hell, as we have seen, | 
is a pit within the earth, a hollow inverted cone, grow-: 
ing narrower as it descends; in which, as space con-| 
tracts, torment is intensified. The outermost borders | 
of the pit constitute an ante-hell, rather than hell itself. | 
It is the abode of the Neutrals, those who are not good | 
enough for heaven, and who have not character enough j 
for hell. | 

Here are confined the angels who at the first great | 
rebellion in the spirit-world stood neither for God nor’ 


THE ENTRANCE TO THE HELL 127 


for his enemies, but only for themselves. Here is 
confined a large part of the human race, even as the 
circuit of this uppermost region of the Inferno is the 
widest. These feeble and cowardly souls, stung by 
flies and wasps, the image of a reproving conscience, 
chase a hurrying standard, while worms in the dust 
beneath their feet absorb their blood and tears. So 
Dante punishes those who only ignored God, but did 
not have force enough to rebel against him. He crosses 
the River Acheron, the joyless river, with Charon for his 
ferryman, who grimly drives the reluctant souls out of 
his boat with the blows of his oar. So they reach hell 
proper, a pit of nine circles, each furnishing a landing- 
place, on one side of which is the wall of solid earth, 
on the other the abyss. 

The first circle of the Inferno proper is called Limbo 
—the home of infants who died unbaptized, and of non- 
believers who had no knowledge of a Saviour. Here 
once dwelt the saints of Old Testament times; but 
when Christ descended into the underworld after his 
resurrection, he rescued them and led them forth in 
‘riumph. Here still, and forever, dwell the heathen 
sages whose ignorance was invincible. There is no out- 
ward infliction. Their pain is the pain of loss, of un- 
satisfied yearning. Within a castle of sevenfold walls 
and gates they lead their shadowy life, neither sad nor 
slad, grave and subdued in aspect, conversing still with 
‘egard to the problems of existence, knowing nothing 
of the present, but only of the past and future. It is 
che highest point of attainment for unbelievers. Here 
Virgil points out “the luminous habitation of the poets.” 
Homer and Horace receive Dante into their company, 






{ 


128 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


and show him Socrates, Plato, and other master-spirits | 
of antiquity. When they leave him, he re-enters the, 
domain of darkness; passes before Minos, the infernal . 
judge; and now at length descends into the hell of post 
tive sin and of real punishment. 

It will be worth our while here to pause a moment) 
and consider the three great divisions under which | 
Dante classifies the sins punished in the eight circles. 
which we have still to visit. There are, to his mind,) 
three great types and gradations of sin. They are in-) 
continence, bestiality, and malice. But neither incon-| 
tinence nor bestiality is precisely what these words, 
would seem to indicate. Incontinence includes all sin) 
of mere emotion and desire, of affection and feeling, 
Lasciviousness, gluttony, avarice, and anger all belong 
to this category. They are sins of impulsive passion, 
exaggerations of principles of our nature which are. 
themselves innocent, but which are indulged in manner 
or measure opposed to the will of God. It is signifi-| 
cant that all these sins are punished in darkness, as. 
befits the nature of them, committed as they have been) 
with mind beclouded by passion. | 

And the respective punishments are punishments in. 
kind. Carnal sinners are swept along by a violent hur- 
ricane, as if to intimate that they who have sown the’ 
wind must reap the whirlwind. Gluttons lie prostrate: 
on the ground beneath a pelting storm of rain, snow, 
and hail; while Cerberus, a sort of personified belly,| 
devours them. The avaricious and the prodigal crawl) 
in two bands in opposite directions, pushing before: 
them great weights which clash together as they meet,’ 
the one band howling to the other: “Why did ye) 















THE HELL. OF BESTIALITY 129 


keep?” and the other howling in return: « Why did 
ye give away?” The wrathful and gloomy are im- 
mersed naked in a lake of mud, and in this lake they 
strike and tear each other. There is an impressive 
lesson here ae Ange rand melancholy are punished 
together. Too much indignation and too little indig- 
nation are equally sins. The wrathful and the wrath- 
Tess both transgress God’s law. “Be ye angry, and sin 
not,” says the Scripture. “Ye that love the Lord, hate 
evil.” Not to be angry at unrighteousness, smoothly 
and indolently to condone wrong-doing, this to Dante is 
sin against God, and they who commit it are imbedded 
in the dregs of the Stygian pool. 

We have been dealing with sins of feeling. How 
solemn a truth does the poet teach us when he makes 
sins of the thoughts to follow these! For this is what 
he means by bestiality, the next great class of trans- 
gressions. The bestial man is the man who is besotted 
in mind, and who gives himself over to infidelity or to 
heresy ; who either says with the fool: “There is no 
God,” or says with the errorist: ‘God is different 
from what he has revealed himself to be.” Here, in 
the flaming city of Dis, where the walls are of iron and 
the darkness is mingled with fire, the arch-heretics are 
confined in red-hot tombs; as if to show the living 
.; of the soul that cuts itself loose from faith in God 
und his revelation. 

Notice that this sin of bestiality or unbelief follows, 
ind grows out of, the sin of wrong desire. The heart 
irst departs from God, and then the intellect follows in 
ts train. It is only an anticipation of Goethe’s dictum: 
‘As are the inclinations, so are the opinions.” When 





{ 


130 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


man gives loose rein to evil affections, the eyes of his | 
understanding are darkened. But there is something | 
worse even than sin of the feelings and of the intellect: 
it is sin of consciously evil will; and so the third great | 
class of iniquities in Dante’s hell is that of malice, in 
its ever-deepening forms, now of violence, then of fraud, 
and finally of treachery. The sin of unbelief cannot | 
maintain itself against the accusations of conscience, 
except by becoming the sin of positive hatred and | 
opposition to God. First the heart, then the intellect, | 
and lastly the will, sets itself against him who made it. | 

Malice is punished after its kind also. The violent, 
such as tyrants, murderers, and marauders, are sunk in 
a boiling river of blood, and as often as they emerge 
are shot at by the Centaurs. Such the fate of those | 
who commit violence against others—they have their 
fill of blood. Suicides, or those who are guilty of vio-| 
lence against themselves, are turned into trees, whose | 
living branches are plucked away by harpies only to) 
grow again. Blasphemers, or those who have done vio- 
lence to God, are exposed to a slow shower of fire upon | 
a plain of burning sand. Below the circle where vio-| 
lence is punished, at a vast depth indeed beneath, fraud 
in its ten sub-divisions has its place of doom. 

Here are seducers and flatterers, the first scour 
by demons, the second immersed in filth.. Simoniacs, | 
who have purchased high places in the Shares with 
money, are fixed in circular holes, like purses, with their 
heads down, their legs only appearing, and the soles of 
their feet burnt with flames. Sorcerers or diviners, as. 
they endeavored to pry into the future, have their heads | 
twisted around so that they have to walk backward now. | 





Set a 


aad 


| 
| THE HELL OF MALICE 131 


Jarterers and peculators are plunged into a lake of boil- 
ag pitch. Hypocrites wear cloaks and hoods which are 
alt outside, but are lined within with lead, whose heavy 
yeight they try with groans to carry. Thieves are per- 
ecuted with a swarm of serpents. Evil counsellors 
re tormented in wrappings of flame that fit them as a 
arment. Slanderers and schismatics have their limbs 
tiserably mangled. Alchemists and forgers are visited 
rith an itching leprosy. 

Last of all comes the well of the primeval giants, the 
iythical demigods who rose against Jove in arms. 
‘hey are representatives of the last and deepest inten- 
ity of sin, the malice that becomes ingratitude, and 
qat betrays kindred and friends, king and country, and 
nally its very God and Saviour. Treachery is in 
Jante’s scheme the utmost malignity of sin, its most 
omplete and dreadful expression. The lowest pit is 
alled the Judecca, because it holds Judas, who betrayed 
is Lord. And here Judas is tormented by Satan, to 
‘hom for thirty pieces of silver he sold himself. 

We have reached hell’s lowest point. Let us gaze at 
atan there. He is a creature of monstrous size— 
ante gives us the means of estimating very accurately 
is dimensions. The primeval giants are each seventy 
‘et tall; Satan is twelve times as great—eight hundred 
hd forty feet therefore in height. At the very center 
( the earth he sits forever flapping his vast and batlike 
ings in effort to escape, while these very movements 
ull the air and turn everything about him to frost and 
He tries to escape, but every effort only freezes 
Im more solidly into his place of imprisonment. He 
hs three heads and three faces, red, white, and black, 


i 
{ 













132 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 








to correspond with the three divisions of the human 
race which he has succeeded in leading to perdition; 
in each one of his three mouths he is craunching and 
devouring a traitor, and of the three traitors Judas is 
chief. | 
The center of hell is not fire but ice—fit type of the 
hardness and coldness of the heart that is past feeling) 
The sin of sense has become the sin of malice, anc 
malice has deepened into treachery and positive hatrec 
to God. Feeling led the way in transgression, but the 
intellect followed, and then the will gave in its con! 
scious adhesion to wrong, until there came the spurning 
of the very mercy that would save, and the sin agains! 
the Holy Ghost that hath never forgiveness, either it 
this world or in that which is to come. 

Before we leave the “Inferno,” it is important t¢ 
note three things. The first is that the grotesquenes: 
and monstrosity of Dante’s punishments are intendec 
to teach a moral lesson—this namely, that sin is some 
thing essentially vile and contemptible. “The Divine 
Comedy” gives a very different picture of Satan, fo: 
example, from that with which we have become fa! 
miliar in the “ Paradise Lost.” Milton’s Satan is “thr 
archangel ruined,”’ but the emphasis seems rather to liv 
upon the “archangel” than upon the “ruined” ; Sata 
has been called, indeed, the hero of the “ Paradise Lost.’ 
But Dante is resolved that no illusive glamour shall sur 
round the great enemy. He will picture him in all hi. 
native cruelty and hatred and malignity, a creature loat 
some and loathed. | 

Milton, it is true, has passages in which the adver 
sary confesses to an inward torment. Those thre! 











| 
| 
| LESSONS OF THE INFERNO 13 
vords, “Myself am hell,” contain the very essence of 
he doctrine of future punishment. But as we see 
satan striding over the burning marl, asserting himself 
n rebellious pride, daring the Almighty to crush him 
vith his thunderbolts, we are forced to admire the un- 
onquerable will that had rather rule in hell than serve 
nheaven. And in all this Milton is false to Scripture. 
c hough Dante goes beyond the Bible in his grotesque 
»hysical images, he expresses more of the spirit of the 
Bible than does Milton. Sin and sinners he holds in 
lerision. Even in the story of “Francesca da Rimini” 
ve do not lose sight of the serpent that lies beneath the 
lowers ; guilty love has in it moral corruption and eter- 
ial despair. All Dante’s demons are hateful; no man 
hrough him shall be seduced into calling darkness 
ight or evil good. He declares that, just as surely as 
he righteous shall rise to everlasting life, the wicked 
hall rise to shame and everlasting contempt. 

| A second lesson which Dante teaches us is that sin 
5 the self-perversion of the will. If there is any 
nought fundamental to his system it is the thought of 
reedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly down- 
rard on the current ; he isa being endowed with power 
) resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not 
uisfortune, or disease, or natural necessity ; it is will- 
Se and crime, and self-destruction. “The Divine 
‘omedy ” is, beyond all other poems, the poem of con- 
science, and this it could not be if it did not recognize 
lan as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own 
il acts and his own evil state. 

Dante is a lover of God and of holiness. He puts 
imself on God's side in the great moral controversy 





134 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” | 



















of the ages. He explains suffering by guilt; he sees, 
the whole race under the load of just penalty; hell is 
to him only the sign of God’s estimate of sin. Is there 
anything that our age needs more than this strengthen- 
ing of conscience, this assertion of the claims of right: 
eousness, this declaration that the soul that sinneth, 
it shall die? Would that our soft and easy-going time, 
soothed almost to sleep as it is by the tempter’s voice, 
“Thou shalt not surely die,” and inclined to compound 
with Almighty justice for indulgence in all sorts of 
pleasurable wickedness, would that our age might listen 
to the awful voices of self-accusation and despair that’ 
sound out from Dante’s hell to proclaim the voluntari- 
ness and the damnableness of sin! | 

Still another lesson from the “ Inferno’ 


) 


is that pen- 
alty is not in its essence external to the sinner. Here 
I know I shall contradict the impressions of many of 
my readers. ‘Dante not a believer in material and) 
physical punishment?” Ah, I did not say that. I said! 
that to Dante the material and the physical were not; 
the essence of punishment. I most earnestly believe! 
that, with all the material imagery of Dante’s hell, he! 
never meant us to take one of these physical punish-) 
ments merely in its literal sense. He believed indeed’ 
in a body, and believed that God would destroy both) 
soul and body in hell; doubtless he expected that sins’ 
of the flesh would be punished in the flesh. But his) 
view of sin as having its source and center in the soul, 
forbade him to put upon the mere body the main stress) 
of penalty. , 4 

People have made the same mistake about Jonathan) 
Edwards. Because he speaks of the sinner as shrivel: 


LESSONS OF THE INFERNO 135 


ing like a worm in the fire of God’s judgments, some 
have supposed that he regarded hell as consisting 
mainly of such physical torments. But this is a mis- 
interpretation of Edwards. As he did not fancy heaven 
to consist in streets of gold or pearly gates, but rather 
in the holiness and communion with Christ of which 
these are symbols, so he did not regard hell as consist- 
ing in fire and brimstone, but rather in the unholiness 
and separation from God of which fire and brimstone 
are symbols. He used the material imagery, because 
he thought that this best answered to the methods of 
Scripture. He probably went beyond the simplicity of 
the Scripture statements, and did not sufficiently ex- 
plain the spiritual meaning of the symbols he used; but I 
am persuaded that he neither understood them literally 
himself, nor meant them to be so understood by others. 
_ What is true of Edwards is true of Dante. In how 
many ways does he show that sin is essentially a condition 
of soul, an alienation of the heart from God, an inner 
conflict and agony! It is shown by the fact that living 
men are represented as already in hell; as eternal life 
is already present in the souls of the good, so eternal 
death is already in the souls of the evil. It is shown by 
the fact that the sinner is made to punish himself; the 
wicked is holden in the cords of his own sins ; sin is its 
own detecter and judge and tormentor. Dante’s doc- 
trine is ever this: “The responsible agent, man, does 
to himself. whatever he does, and his deeds return to the 
doer.” The material symbols are nothing more than 
ymbols—symbols of the corruption and death which 
re involved in sin itself—symbols of the fact that sin 
tends to permanence; that sin at last is stamped upon 





136 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


the soul as its eternal form; that the free-will becomes | 
at last enslaved to evil; that the sinner, apart from) 
divine grace, tends ever downward in an ever-increas-/ 
ing intensity of selfish will, and an ever-increasing in-| 
tensity of punishment. | 
It is pleasant to emerge from the Inferno, even! 
though we have learned from it so many lessons.} 
Dante emerges under the guidance of Virgil. Having 
passed the center of the earth in his descent, he takes his} 
upward way to the opposite side of the globe from that: 
at which he entered. But the force of gravity is) 
against him now. ‘“ Facilis descensus Averno”’; and we 
may add, Dzfficelis ascensus Calo. By what road does. 
he ascend? Ah, there is a channel worn through the 
solid earth by the stream that flows downward from the! 
Mount of Purgatory. That stream is made up of the 
tears of the penitents who make reparation on the 
mount, and whose guilt and depravity, as fast as it is! 
purged away, flows downward to Satan from whom it! 
came and with whom it now abides forever. | 
As our toilworn pilgrim emerges from the bowels of. 
the earth and plants his feet upon the Mount of Purifi-) 
cation, the day begins to break, and the sorrow of his’ 
soul gives place to joy. He sees an angel-piloted bark| 
approaching the island-mount, a bark which brings to} 
purgatory, from the banks of the Tiber, all souls which| 
have died at peace with the church, and who only need’ 
to be freed from the remains of sin to be fitted for 
heaven. Here we need to remember that in Roman | 
Catholic doctrine, purgatory is only a temporary abid- | 
ing place. Purgation may last for hundreds of years, 
but it cannot last forever. i 


















FROM HELL TO PURGATORY F3/ 


All who enter hell go there to stay. In purgatory 
none ever stay. And yet none wish to depart. They 
desire only to be cleansed. They bear willingly, yes 
even gladly, the chastisements of God, which are meant 
for their correction in righteousness. The reeds with 
which the shores of that island are fringed, yielding 
ever as they do to the swaying of the waves, are the 
symbol of the will of the mountain’s habitants, bending 
ever to the slightest movement of the will of God, 
On this mount they bemoan their sins. It is a sweet 
and holy dwelling-place, irradiated by the southern 
cross, a constellation unseen in our cold northern 
climes ; the grassy slopes are kept green by the tears 
of the penitents; angels visit it to encourage them, 
admonish them, guide them upward, in their toilsome 
striving; hymns and prayers to God are continually 
ascending from its terraces, as from altar-stairs; its 
summit is the terrestrial paradise, from which by a short 
step the soul, with the temporary shade-body which it 
wears till the resurrection, can rise from earth to 
heaven. 

_ There is an ante-purgatory, just as there was an ante- 
hell. This ante-purgatory is under the wardenship of 
Cato of Utica, that model of ancient self-control. 
Here at the base of the mountain are detained those 

ho deferred repentance during their former life ; they 
are compelled to wait outside of St. Peter’s gate a hun- 
dred years for every year of that former delay—that is, 
kre compelled to wait unless their stay 1s shortened by 
the pious prayers of friends whom they have left behind, 
pyne€é moment of whose intense intercessions has power 
io deliver from years of purgatorial sorrow. Voltaire 


| 




























138 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


said rightly that in purgatory the church had found 
what Archimedes vainly longed for, a zov otw upon 
which he might plant his lever to move the world. : 

The souls in this place of preliminary trial chant the 
Miserere and the Compline Hymn, and so get help 
against the Adversary. At St. Peter’s Gate, purgatory 
proper first begins. They approach it by a threefold 
stair, symbolic of the confession, contrition, and satis: 
faction which the church requires. An angel with 
flaming sword keeps the door, charged to err by admit. 
ting, rather than to err by excluding, those who seek 
admission there; and yet there is a safeguard—he who 
after entering should look back, would again find hig 
self without. 

Upon the brow of each one so admitted the angi 
with his sword of flame marks seven times the letter P, 
which means Peccatum, Peccavi, and indicates that there 
are seven capital sins which must be successively purged 
away. There are seven terraces, each devoted to the 
purgation of one of these sins of pride, envy, anger, 
sloth, avarice, gluttony, lasciviousness ; and when the 
purgation of any one of these is complete, the corre: 
sponding mark of shame vanishes from the brow. So 
the process goes on until the forehead is pure as at 
man’s first creation; and, as the soul leaps up in free 
dom and regains once more its lost estate of innocency, 
the whole Mount of Purgatory shakes for joy. 4 

In the Inferno sin grows in intensity as the circles 
narrow and we go downward. In purgatory the rule is 
just the opposite; the greatest sins are first purged 
away, and the mountain narrows as we ascend. Progress 
upward is at the first slow and difficult, and the heights 


ee fon ad rie 





THE SEVEN TERRACES OF THE MOUNT 139 






are great. But each sin removed gives new freedom; 
the distances grow smaller and the ascent more rapid ; 
for “to him that hath shall be given,” and when the 
sins that so easily beset are all laid aside, the soul 
“mounts up with wings as eagles” ; nothing now is left 
to separate between it and God. 

_ There is another relation between the structure of 
the purgatory and the hell—sins in both are classified 
under three general divisions. In the Purgatory, how- 
ever, the classification is that of the medizval theolo- 
zians, into love distorted, love defective, and love ex- 
cessive. Under love distorted, pride, envy, and anger 
are ranged—each being regarded as loving evil to one’s 
aeighbor. Love defective is represented only by sloth 
—this loves too little the highest good. Love excessive 
qas three divisions—avarice, or the excessive love of 
noney ; gluttony, or the excessive love of food ; lascivi- 
dusness, or the excessive love of sensual pleasure. 
The seven terraces around the mountain are but 
sighteen feet in width, for “narrow is the way that 
eads to life.’ On the one side of each is the preci- 
vice; on the other the rocky wall, up which there is but 
me long and steep ascent, by stairs, to the terrace next 
tbove. | 

' Let us delay for one moment to glance at the chas- 
isements of the Mount of Penitence. In the first cir- 
le pride, the primal sin and root of all other sins, is 
nade to suffer. The proud are bowed to the earth by 
leavy weights of stone placed upon their backs; and 
s they move onward in long procession, their eyes 
ifted up no longer, they look sideways at wonderfully 
culptured representations of humility upon the rocky 


ii. 





140 ‘THE DIVINE COMEDY” 






























wall, or downward at wonderfully sculptured represen) 
tations of pride upon the pavement beneath their feet,, 
while spirit voices chant the Lord’s Prayer and “ Blessed 
are the poor in spirit.” | 

In the second terrace the envious are punished by 
having the eyes that looked askance on others sewed up 
with iron thread, while mantled in prickly haircloth they; 
are compelled to sit shoulder to shoulder, leaning upon 
one another and recognizing their mutual obligation and 
dependence. The eyes that have transgressed are not 
permitted now to see, and so instruction is communk 
cated to them by spirit voices that record the various| 
historical instances of love or of envy. “Blessed are 
the merciful,” and “ Rejoice, O Victor,” are the saluta: 
tions that signalize release. | 

The third circle is devoted to the chastisement of 
anger. This too is punished in kind, by a dense fog, 
symbolic of the passion which blinds the eyes of the 
wrathful. The fog is bitter as smoke and black as 
night, and it is only in ecstatic vision that the angry 
souls are reminded of noble examples of forbearance, 
and of the murderous fruits of the opposite vice. The 
souls here suffering pray to the Lamb of God for 
mercy, and the beatitude that celebrates the comple: 
tion of their purging is “ Blessed are the peacemakers.” 

But we must hasten up the mount. The slothful are 
punished in the fourth terrace by being forced against! 
their nature to run races with each other; while they 
exercise the virtue opposite to their own failing by 
shouting out to each other shameful illustrations of! 
lukewarmness and inspiring instances of diligence. 
Avarice, in the circle next above, is bound hand and 


| 


K | 
| LESSONS OF THE PURGATORIO 141 
foot ; and, as it has refused to look upward to higher 
good, so it is now made to grovel on the earth. « My 
soul cleaveth unto the dust,” is the cry of the penitent ; 
and ‘ Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after 
righteousness” is the sign of their victory over this 
their besetting sin. Then comes the circle of the 
gluttonous, tormented by the tree of Tantalus, a tree 
that entices by its wealth of fragrant fruits, but that 
widens upward instead of downward, and evermore 
withholds the means of gratification from the famished 
soul. Haggard and emaciated, the gluttonous crowd 
about it, casting eager eyes upon its precious burden, but 
only to elicit from its branches urgent admonitions to 
temperance. 

In the seventh and last circle lasciviousness is ex- 
piated by long lines of penitents who pass through a 
fierce flame proceeding from the rocky wall beside them, 
Dante and Virgil both enter into this flame. Only 
here, and in the third terrace where anger is punished, 
does Dante himself suffer with the penitents. Of two 
sins only he seems to himself to need purging. And the 
penal fire does its work. His soul is purified from its 
last remaining sin. He is now master of himself, and 
as a crowned and mitred sovereign, with the lost image 
of God restored, he enters the terrestrial paradise, the 

‘den from which man was expeiled for his sin. Virgil 
now can no longer be his guide, and Beatrice comes to 
take Virgil’s place, after Dante has drunk of the waters 
of Lethe, which extinguish the memory of the past, and 

f the waters of Eunoé, which bring back the memory 

f the good. 

_ Amid the living verdure and the fragrant flowers, the 





eae 


142 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


pleasant zephyrs and the singing birds, we would gladly 
linger. There are two remarks, however, which I must: 
make with regard to Dante’s purgatory, before I leave! 
it. And the first is that, like the hell, Dante does 
not regard it as a place, so much as it is a process,’ 
Doubtless he believed in the place, and sought to give! 
an imaginative picture of it. But much more he be: 
lieved in the thing—the necessity of purification, | 
“Without holiness no man can see the Lord”’; “put to. 
death the deeds of the flesh”; ‘cleanse yourselves | 
therefore from all filthiness of the flesh and of the | 
spirit”; these are the essential truths which were in| 
Dante’s mind. The Christian doctrine of sanctification 
is put into verse in Dante’s poem, and so far, both Prot. 
estant and Romanist may find in it a source of great | 
religious incitement and profit. . 4 

Indeed the purgatory comes nearer to our common 
life than either the hell or the paradise. The former i is 
too far beneath us, and the latter is too far above. But | 
every man can recognize resemblance to himself in the | 
penitents of purgatory; that is, if he has even a spark | 
of the hatred of sin and longing for holiness which | 
God’s regenerating Spirit has inspired. The tender 
and humble confessions of the sufferers, their submis: | 
sion to the divine chastisements, their eager appropria- | 
tion of all helps to their restoration which are bestowed — 
by the word or the Spirit of God, are full of subduing | 
beauty. Nowhere in literature, outside of the Bible, 
have we so nobly portrayed “the blessedness of him | | 
whose transgression is forgiven and whose sin is COV= | 
ered.” . ; 

This first remark about the purgatory has had to do | 





















LESSONS OF THE PURGATORIO 143 


vith that which Roman Catholicism and Protestantism 
lave in common. My second remark has to do with 
he differences between them. There are two respects 
a which Protestants must regard Dante’s representa- 
ions as painfully erroneous. On the one hand he errs, 
the Roman Catholic Church has erred, in extending 
he period of purification beyond the confines of death. 
che literal interpretation is better—purgatory is only 
m this earth and in this life. «After death” there is, 
ot purification, but “judgment.” For multitudes the 
Xomanist doctrine is a doctrine of second probation. 
fen are content here with being at peace with the 
hurch, while they are not yet at peace with God. The 
eal controversy between themselves and their Judge is 
djourned to the future world. Purgatory, with all its 
ufferings, becomes the basis of false hopes; distant 
affering is chosen rather than immediate renunciation 
f sin; a fatal trust is put in what the sinner can do by 
fay of reparation, rather than in what Christ has done 
y way of atonement. 

And this leads me to notice another error intimately 
onnected with that which I have just mentioned, and 
hich Protestants must ever most strenuously oppose. 
refer now to Dante’s error in making the process of 
urification a penal one. If there is any truth of 
cripture more vital and precious ‘than another, it is that 
" the completeness of Christ’s sacrifice. Our sins, 
ad all of them, were “laid on him”; he “has re- 
-emed us from the curse of the law, being made a 
irse for us’’; “there is therefore now no condemna- 

n to them who are in Christ Jesus.”’ God chastises 
's children; but it is in love, and it is for their 


! 


144 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


good. There is no anger and there is no penalty, since 
| 


Nothing, either great or small, 
Remains for me to do ; 
Jesus died and paid it all, 
Yes, all the debt I owe. 


} 


The notion that the sufferings and calamities of the 
present life are of the nature of punishment is contrary, 
to the whole doctrine of the New Testament, and con 
stitutes “a bridge to the Roman Catholic doctrine of 
purgatorial fires.” Neither in this world nor in the 
world to come can any mortal add by penance of his 
own to the efficacy of that sacrifice of Christ which 
was offered once for all. Dante was not in advance of 
his age, nor was he yet possessed of the spirit of the 
Lutheran Reformation. Justification by faith alone had 
not yet dawned upon him as God’s only way of. salva. 
tion. The “mass” to him was still a repetition of 
Christ’s death, and the pains of purgatory voluntarily, 
endured by the penitent were still needed to supple, 
ment what Christ had done upon the cross. | 

So at last we came to Dante’s Paradise, a creation in, 
some respects loftier and more wonderful than either 
the Hell or the Purgatory, but, for the reason that it is 
so lofty and wonderful, less attractive than either of 
these to the ordinary mind. Yet, as I read the poet's 
sublime meditations upon the greatest truths of re) 
ligion and philosophy, I am impressed with the self | 
sufficiency of his genius. Never, even in its highest 
soaring, does the wing of his imagination seem to flag} 
Or, if ever earthly pictures seem to fail and earthly, 
words are incapable of expressing the “ exceeding ane 
eternal weight of glory,” piety and worship furnish what, 


| 












| 
bi 
art cannot supply, and the glowing heart of the poet 
shows itself most manifestly lost in adoration and in Joy. 
Heaven, we must remember, is to Dante’s mind the 
state of the perfected will; or rather, the state of the 
will that has been freed at length from earthly and sen- 
sual desires. But while perfection in the sense of sin- 
essness belongs to all the inhabitants of the blessed 
‘ealm, perfection in the sense of Capacity is ever en- 
arging. All are as full as they can hold of the love 
ind purity of God, yet one can hold more than another. 
To use the medizeval illustration, «A king may clothe 
il his children equally with cloth of gold, yet the 
‘mount of the cloth apportioned to each may vary ac- 
‘ording to their size.” In heaven too, as well as in the 
ower realms, each soul goes to his own place. Out- 
vard surroundings are simply the fit accompaniments 
‘nd evidences of character. As the soul laden with sin 
'Xperiences a downward, so the soul possessed of purity 
‘Xperiences an upward, gravitation; and each one can 
ay with King Richard, in Shakespeare’s play: ‘Mount, 
tount, my soul—thy seat is up on high!”” As we 
‘ass upward then from one heavenly sphere to another, 
‘e are to remember that we are not among the race of 
inners any longer—we are rather among those whose 
arying native gifts and whose varying degrees of faith- 
ilness in the exercise of these gifts constitute an ever- 
arying receptivity for the life and love of God. 
| Beatrice, the symbol of heavenly wisdom, is now 
Jante’s guide. As he gazes upon her face, the light of 
1€ terrestrial paradise is lost in another light. « Sud- 
enly day seemed added unto day, as if Omnipotence 


ad lit up the sky with another sun.” The poet is 
: Kk 


THE NINE SPHERES OF THE PARADISE 145 














146 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


lifted up from earth to heaven. And yet it is the low 
est heaven which first he visits—the heaven of the 
moon, with its waxing and waning, the proper home oj 
those whose wills on earth were imperfect through in 
stability. Here are nuns, who, being constrained t¢ 
marry, did not return to their vows when they hag! 
opportunity. This sphere is revolved by the angels, 
The next sphere is that of Mercury, and archangels 
have it in charge, turning it in due order around the 
earth and the sphere of the moon which it encloses! 
In this sphere of Mercury abide those whose wills were 
on earth imperfect through love of fame—men of great 
activity and eloquence, who lived on the whole for God) 
yet at the same time had some regard to the praise 0 
men. 
Then comes the sphere of Venus, revolved by the 
Principalities, and fitly made the home of those whost 
wills on earth were imperfect through excess of humat 
love, even though that love was in itself lawful. Her 
Dante is led to 


Admire the Art that turns to good 
Such passion, and the Wisdom manifold 
Whence earthly love by heavenly is subdued. 


Thence he is lifted to the sun, the fourth heaven 
revolved by the Powers. Here, in this chief light of the 
material universe, I am happy to observe that he place: 
the abode of doctors of divinity and philosophy, proba; 
bly because they have themselves been sources of High, 
to the church. 4 

The sphere of Mars, to which the poet next ascetiil 
is revolved by the Virtues. Here he sees the forms 0| 





THE NINE SPHERES OF THE PARADISE 147 














istinguished warriors, confessors, and+martyrs for the 
aith, not drawn up in the order of an earthly army but 
anged together in the shape of across. Then comes 
3 sphere of Jupiter, of which the Dominations have 
ontrol. Here rulers eminent for justice are disposed, 
1 the shape of an eagle; and wonderful to tell, the 
agle, collective representation of earth’s noblest kings 
ad potentates, itself finds a voice, and speaks to Dante 
f the greater things of the divine kingdom. In the 
lanet Saturn, or seventh heaven, revolved by the 
‘hrones, are found contemplative spirits, or those who 
ave furnished the most illustrious examples of the 
‘onastic life. The cold sphere of Saturn is peculiarly 
Japted to the monks and hermits, who have resigned 
ve warmth of the fireside and the fervors of civic life 
\ order to give themselves to prayer and to the study 
: heavenly truth. 
| The heaven of the fixed stars comes next; for Dante 
new of no planet beyond Saturn. Here the cherubim 
ove the sphere, and the apostles and saints of the Old 
ad of the New Testaments have their dwelling. And 
bre, before he is permitted to ascend higher, Dante 
pSses an examination on the subject of faith, hope, 
ad love—St. Peter, St. James, and St. John success- 
ely conducting it. When he has shown himself expert 
i these prerequisites to heavenly bliss, the poet is car- 
ied up to the ninth or highest heaven, revolved by the 
‘raphim. This sphere is called the Primum Mobtle, 
hcause its motion is most rapid, and is the cause of 
otion to all the spheres which it encloses. This high- 
t heaven is starless and crystalline ; and here “the 
Ine orders of the celestial hierarchy circle in fiery rings 





148 ““THE DIVINE COMEDY” 










manifested as an Atomic Point.” | 

Dante has reached the summit of being, and is pe) 
mitted to gaze upon its uncreated Source. AQ streal| 
of light proceeds from God himself. In that light th 
multitude of saints and angels find their blessedness. | 


And as a cliff looks down upon the bed 
Of some clear stream, to see how richly crowned 
With flowers and foliage is its lofty head ; 

So all from earth who hither e’ er returned, 
Seated on more than thousand thrones around, 
Within the Eternal Light themselves discerned. 


| 

It is the “Rose of the Blessed” —the great compan 
of the redeemed, circling like petals of a rose, ran 
beyond rank, around the mystical lake of light whic 
reflects that “Light which no man hath seen or ca 
see.” The saints of all ages are here, from Adam t 
St. Paul, and from the Virgin Mary to Beatrice. A 
the praises which Dante has hitherto lavished upon th! 
lady of his love fail now, he says, to give any adequat 
conception of her loveliness, as with him she ascends t 
the highest heaven. | 

But his love is now no merely earthly love—he ha 
learned the lesson that “our loves in higher lov 
endure.’ Love for God draws him nearer to Beatric¢ 
and conversely love for Beatrice draws him nearer ¢| 
God. His eyes, and all eyes, are supremely set on th 
Highest of all—the triune God, into partnership wit) 
whom our humanity has been taken, in the person ¢ 
the Son, and whose Trinity in Unity is now unfolded ¢) 
the adoring contemplation of his creatures. At th!| 


THE ROSE OF THE BLESSED 149 


tercession of St. Bernard, Dante is enabled with puri- 
ted sight to gaze directly upon the supreme Jehovah, 
nd is moved to pray that grace may be given him so to 
itter what he sees that generations to come may catch 


i 


: glimpse of the sublime vision : 
| 


O sovereign Light ! who dost exalt thee high 
Above all thoughts that mortal may conceive, 
Recall thy semblance to my mental eye, 

And let my tongue record the wondrous story, 
That I to nations yet unborn may leave 
One spark at least of thy surpassing glory ! 


jut the sight transcends all powers of description. 
nly one thing is made plain,—and that the greatest 
aing of all,—in God, Light and Love are one: 


The glorious vision here my powers o’ ercame ; 


But now my will and wish were swayed by Love— 


(As turns a wheel on every side the same) 
Love—at whose word the sun and planets move. 


| So ends “ The Divine Comedy.” The translation of 
Vright, which I have generally used because it best 
2presents the rhythm and rhyme of the original, is in 
iese last lines in one respect defective ; it does not put 
t the end the word with which Dante meant his poem 
yclose. That word is the “stars.” With this word 
ads the “Inferno ” 


Emerging, we once more beheld the stars. 


Vith this word he ends the “ Purgatorio ” 


And with a will endued to mount the stars, 


150 ‘““THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


With this word he ends also the “ Paradiso” : 


The Love that moves the sun and the other stars, 






























We can now see how narrow and unintelligent tha 
criticism is which represents Dante’s poetry as savag: 
and grotesque, and regards the poet as capable only 0 
rough effects. The truth is that Dante is the most sen 
sitive of all poets to the changeful aspects of nature 
every hour of the day or of the night has to him it 
peculiar beauty ; no poet ever read in the book of na 
ture more spiritual lessons; no poet ever expresse¢ 
those lessons in more varied and melodious phrase 
When the boys of the street saw Dante go by, they 
said: “There goes the man that was in Hell!” anc 
there was in his countenance a solemn gravity whiek 
gave verisimilitude to the popular report. But he dic 
not revel in horrors, as some imagine. It was his in. 
stinct of righteousness, and not a morbid disposition tc 
gloat over suffering, that furnished the axzmus of his 
dark descriptions of the torments of the lost. He hac 
an enthusiasm for justice; but then he had also a soul 
tremulously sensitive to the least of earth’s sorrows anc 
to all those benignant agencies by which God woul 
remedy them. Dante was thoroughgoing. He * 
the depth of man’s need; he saw the grandeur of the 
heavenly discipline. He did not waste his fervors on 
sin or sinners; he reserved those fervors for struggling 
purity and ae God’s plan of rescue and _ restoration, 
Dante is the most ethical of poets—he measures all 
things by the standard of the sanctuary. But all 
beauty that is real or lasting—all moral beauty, in 

| 


a 
| 


{ 
| 


LIGHT AND LOVE CONSTITUTE’ HIS HEAVEN ISI 














short—wakes in Dante’s soul responsive emotions, and 
finds a calm and sweet expression in his verse. 

_ Take, for example, the poet’s ruling conception of 
heaven. It is that of light—light qualified by love. 
No language upon earth has such a marvelous wealth 
of terms expressive of the varying shades and aspects 
of light as has the Italian. And the most of these it 
owes to Dante. He not only pressed into service every 
word his native Italian furnished, but he revived scores 
of words which slept in the Latin classics; and, when 
these would not suffice, he coined yet others from the 
mint of his own brain. This was no fanaticism of sen- 
suous delight; it was the struggle of a great nature to 
2xpress moral truth through the poor vehicle of human 
speech. There rang forever in his ears that sounding 
and sublime sentence: “God is light, and in him is no 
darkness at all.’ In the “ Paradise,” when all other 
sarthly images fail him to describe the state of the re- 
leemed, he represents their blessedness under the fig- 
are of ever new intensities and splendors of the light. 
The saints are “ light inthe Lord” ; they have ‘“‘awaked, 
ind risen from the dead, and Christ has given them 
ight.” 

So the “light” is the light of truth, of purity, of 
1oliness—the opposite to that “darkness” which is 
‘rror and impurity and sin. As God himself is light, 
ind dwells in the light which is unapproachable, so each 
uccessive rise in the scale of being is a rise from one 
legree of light to another—not a merely physical and 
Massive elevation either, since it is the mind and heart 
ind will into which and through which “the true light 
low shineth.” No Mohammedan paradise is here, but 


——— 



















152 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


= 


only the paradise which consists in holiness and in like. 
ness to God. The poet who could thus resist the sen- 
suous and externalizing influences of the church of his 
day must not only have drunk deep of a nobler than 
Pierian spring—even the well of Holy Scripture, but 
must have been specially guided and enlightened by the 
Holy Spirit of God. 

In another respect Dante’s “ Paradise ”’ is worthy of | 
highest praise. It represents nearness to God and sery- 
ice to God’s creatures as contemporaneous. Rank in 
God’s creation is determined by the clearness of the 
soul’s vision of God—here the mystical and contem- 
plative element in religion has its rights accorded to it. 
But the ascetic exaggerations of this truth, which had 
so infected the life of the church, Dante is almost, 
wholly a stranger to. He writes from the point of view, 
not of the monk, but of the common Christian. Ex. 
ceedingly few of the so-called saints of the Roman 
Catholic calendar does he deign to notice; the more. 
healthful scriptural examples of chastity and faith and 
endurance are strewn thickly over his pages. And 
then, most remarkable of all, he has made the nine) 
heavens, with all their upper and lower spheres, only. 
the working-places of the redeemed; while their work-| 
ing-places are below, their dwelling-places are on high, 
in the mystical White Rose which is above all time and 
space, around the mystical lake of light, where there 1s; 
no need of sun or moon because God and the Lamb are) 
the light of it. 4 

All the saints dwell in the light of God's immediall 
presence, and according to their capacity are made to) 
reflect that light. But just in proportion to the light) 


THE SPIRITUAL WORLD IS THE REAL 153 














| 
| 


vhich they are able to receive, just in proportion 
o their nearness to God and the clearness of _ their 
‘ision of him, is the service they are permitted to ren- 
ler others. At the same time that they worship above, 
hey have an existence and perform a service in the uni- 
verse of time and space. The highest of them can 
telp God’s creatures in the heaven of the fixed stars; 
he lowest of them can help those who are just begin- 
ing their course in the heaven of the moon. It is not 
yorth our while to stop here and smile at Dante, until 
ve ponder those words of our Lord from which the poet, 
» may be, derived the suggestion of his thought: “See 
aat ye despise not one of these little ones, for . . . in 
eaven their angels do Cue behold the face of my 
‘ather which is in heaven.” What is this but to Say : 
feaven and earth are not mutually exclusive. Angels 
-and if angels, why not redeemed men?—by so much 
3 they are near to God, by so much do they busy them- 
slves in service to God’s creatures. Heaven is no ref- 
ge of idleness; no hands hang down, and no lips are 
umb. “His servants shall serve him.” Knowledge 
God and service to men are contemporaneous and 
iterdependent. The nearer we get to God the larger 
ill be our sphere of loving activity; the more shall 
'e resemble him, who, though he was the very Son of 
od and in the very bosom of the Father, yet was 
mong us “as one that serveth.” 
'So holiness is joined to love, and holiness and love 
igether constitute Dante’s heaven. It is beautiful to 
e how, in the “ Paradise,” all heaven rejoices over the 
2w joy of each victorious and ascending spirit, and 
Ww increasing nearness to God brings its inhabitants 


=o 



























154 “THE DIVINE COMEDY” 


ever nearer to each other. Even the ministrants in thi 
upper temple get new understanding of the wonders 0 
God’s grace, and take on a new brightness of holy lows 
as they see Dante enter heaven. 

It was with such thoughts as these that the exil 
soothed the long years of his poverty and disappoint 
ment. Who can wonder that to him the spiritual worl 
became at last more real than the material world tha 
was open to his senses! It is sometimes made causi 
of complaint against him that his representations wer 
so matter of fact; that his journey through hell, purga 
tory, and heaven was so real a journey; that its inci 
dents were so like the incidents of actual experience 
Ah, this is the wonder and the poetry of it! Imagina 
tion and piety created a new world. Just so did Johr 
Bunyan, in Bedford jail, turn from the earthly to thi 
heavenly, from the seen to the unseen, from the tem 
poral to the eternal. He not only saw Christian mak 
ing his way from the City of Destruction to th 
/ Heavenly City, but he was Christian. x 

So Dante’s vividness of description is not mere liter 
ary art; it is a deeper process than that—it is a livin, 
through the things which he described, so that he to 
could say: Quorum magnaque pars fut. It is this : 
tense realism which gives the “ Divine Comedy ” its chie 
power. It is the utterance of the greatest man of hi 
time, and one of the greatest men of all times. It is 
his conscientious and God-fearing attempt to exprest 
the truth of God as his generation apprehended it, anc 
so to express it that it might influence all after ages 
to turn from error and iniquity to truth and righteous: 
ness. Thomas Carlyle has called Dante “the oul 


| 


| THE SPIRITUAL WORLD IS THE REAL 155 
piece of the Middle Ages.” The German Tieck declares 
that in him “ten silent centuries found a voice.” This 
seems high praise, but Dante deserves higher praise than 
this. He is the mouthpiece, not only of the Middle Ages, 
but of all ages. Not twelve centuries, but all the cen- 
turies, find a voice in him. He illustrates truths that 
are true not only then, but now and always—truths of 
3in and purgation and recovery to righteousness, truths 
‘or the expression of which God spread the floor of the 
4niverse with its mosaic of constellations, and caused 
the curtain of night and chaos to rise at the creation. 

' “The corruption of the will, the purification of the 
will, the perfection of the will,” these are Dante’s 
‘hemes ; and, as they are the greatest themes of all, so 
hey are themes the most deeply affecting and perma- 
ently inspiring. Like Mary’s breaking of the alabaster 
90x, this offering of Dante to Beatrice, wherever the 
xospel goes, will be spoken of for a memorial of her; 
vut it will be a memorial of something higher still, even 
f that higher love which spoke through the love of 
he Triune God to a humanity that was sunk and lost 
n its sin. For this reason the poem of Dante will 
lever die. Dante’s universe has changed. In the 
nidst of the western hemisphere modern discovery has 
ound not the Mount of Purgatory but a vast new con- 
inent. Our earth is no longer the center of the solar 
ystem—it is a satellite of the sun instead. But the 
reat truths of being remain just what they were in 
Dante’s time ; and the “ Divine Comedy” will be immor- 
al, because it is the grandest utterance yet given by 
aan to these universal and fundamental principles in 

e€ nature of man and the nature of God. 





















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SHAKESPEARE 


THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 















Her who attempts to write about Shakespeare may 
vell feel as Hamlet did: he undertakes a task that 
ranscends his powers. No great name in literature has 
iad so much written about him, and this of itself shows 
hat he is the greatest name. When all the lesser orbs 
lave been circling around this sun and striving in their 
neasure to reflect his light, it may seem hopeless to 
ywopound anything that is both new and true. 

In dealing with Shakespeare we seem to be dealing 
vith one of the great operations of nature. There is 
| mysterious largeness about him. He is not merely 
m individual poet, he is a great elemental force in the 
vorld’s thought. He has been called the myriad- 
ninded. His own personality is well-nigh lost in his 
vork, and that work absorbs into itself, while it repre- 
ents and relumes for us all the varied secular life of 
iis time. But his merit is a deeper and more vital one 
han this. He has struck the fundamental tones of 
ecular human life everywhere andalways. His poetry, 
ore than any other, holds the mirror up to nature as 
t now is, and answers to Aristotle’s definition of poetry 
iS “an expression of the universal.”’ 

There was a day when schoolboys were set to writing 
‘ssays on “Virtue.” Their wrestlings with the vast 

159 


160 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


abstract theme were pitiful. Yet to some there was an 
attraction in the very greatness of the subject, and later 
years have seen them bending sharper powers of analy: 
sis to its comprehension. To write on Shakespeare is 
like writing on virtue. Success is possible by ne 
schoolboy methods. Only the application of a broad 
philosophy will bring out valuable results. I propose 
therefore to preface what I have to say about Shakes 
peare with a brief statement of the true place and fune 
tion of imagination, and of dramatic poetry as a means 
of imaginative expression. 

It is a great error to regard imagination as an illegiti 
mate child of reason, to be disowned and kept out oi 
sight as much as possible. This was the view of Plato, 
He loved knowledge; he desired to see things as they 
are. Imagination, in his view, coins only fiction, anc 
fiction is untruth; imagination and philosophy are in 
consistent with each other; hence he banishes all poets 
from his ideal republic. Modern narrowness and asceti 
cism have often reproduced the error of Plato, and have 
put their ban upon the novel and upon the fine arts 
The cure for all this is to be found in a proper appre 
hension of the relation between imagination and othei 
operations of the mind. 

Imagination in its most obvious meaning is the 
image-making power of the intellect. In this sense if 
is a help and condition of all the more advanced menta 
processes. Our earliest perceptions of the self and the 
not-self are doubtless direct contacts, but our latet 
knowledges are really combinations of direct perception 
with the images which past experiences have given us. 
I see a bit of red light among the leaves. Only when 


e: 
THE FUNCTION OF IMAGINATION: 161 


| 

E 

I add an image stored up in the mind, can I call it an 
i Memory itself is impossible without imagina- 
tion; there must be an image of the past, as well as a 
‘recognition of that image as representing a former state 
of the self. All judgment with regard to the new 
involves imagination, for only imagination can enable us 
to compare the new with the old. Only the image- 
making faculty can bring together the present and the 
absent, the particular thing and the general standard to 
which it is to be referred. 

Brutes have percepts and they can recall them. Even 
dogs have a low imagination and can dream. Imagina- 
‘tion becomes rational and human, only when it is able 
to distinguish between dream images and the actual per- 
cepts of present experience. But there is also a 
rational imagination which is free—a power of recom- 
bining the percepts of the past in an order determined 
‘by the mind itself. Imagination has a constructive 
‘power, as well as a reproductive power. It leaves out 
the irrelevant ; it puts together the essential. 

__ Just in proportion to men’s breadth of experience 
and insight into truth is their use of imagination in 
construing the world about them and reducing it to 
order and unity under its typical forms. Napoleon said 
well that the men of imagination rule the world. Tyn- 
dall can speak very properly of the scientific use of the 
imagination: «“Nourished,” he says, “by knowledge 
partially won, and bounded by co-operant reason, imagi- 
mation becomes the mightiest instrument of the physi- 
cal discoverer.’’ Great inductions, like Sir Isaac New- 
ton’s, are only the ventures of the rational imagination 


into the world of truth that is hidden from the multi- 
L 


162 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


| 
, 


tude. The hypotheses which precede experiment call 
never be framed without imagination. Kepler thinks | 
God’s thoughts after him, and his discovery is a work of 
imagination, quite as much as it is a work of reason, 
Art, as well as science, is man’s attempt to reconstruct 
the universe in its essential ideas, and to set forth the 
real life of things. 

Art then is not imitation, but creation. The creative 
imagination is the most rational and lofty form of imagi- 
nation, for it attempts to reproduce, not so much per. 
sons and things, as the formative idea of persons and 
things, the typical thought for which they stand and 
which gives them all their value. We have indeeda 
so-called art, like that of Verestschagin in painting and 
of Zola in literature, which aims to depict simply what, 
7s, in all its minute detail, whether that be ennobling or 
disgusting. This realism is not truly realistic, for it 
does not penetrate beneath the surface. It describes 
the very nails and hairs of the body, but gives no inti 
mation of its life. It has no belief in the existence of 
God, and so it sees in the universe no soul, no thought, 
no dignity, no worthy ends. It does not see that the 
ideal is the most real element in the real, and so it con- 
founds the real with the actual. Upon this principle,’ 
as Hutton has suggested, the picture of a cannibal feast 
might be a work of art, and poetry might devote itself 
to descriptions of lust without love. | 

But there is a God, and the universe is a rational uni 
verse. Through this phenomenal world another noume- 
nal world is striving to express itself. God’s creative 
activity indeed is essentially a continuous presentation 
of the divine ideas to intelligent beings. In his out 







a : POETRY AN EXPRESSION OF THE UNIVERSAL 163 


ward creation God gives us illustrations of his truth, 
‘hat we eae be taught to use our own creative powers. 
And man’s creative activity is the discovery by the 
magination of these same divine ideas and the putting 
Pe them into new combinations and forms. If the forms 
ire merely abstract, we call this work of the imagina- 
jon philosophy; if the forms are concrete, we call the 
‘esult art. 

Man has a free will, and he may deny and contradict 
hese ideas both in his thought and in his life. He may 
magine error, and devise wickedness. Art will then be- 
ome artful—it will lend its many hues to the serpent, 
E will clothe vice with a hideous attraction. But it 
rill still by contrast illustrate the divine truth which 
ras meant to be its stimulus and goal. Do we conclude 
hat the true artist must be a dogmatist and a conscious 
reacher of virtue? No, we merely say that only the 
yan in whom morality and religion are living principles 
an ever see deeply enough into the heart of things to 
ecome a true artist. 
| Now poetry is the greatest and noblest of the arts, 
nd that for the reason that, while equally with philoso- 
hy it penetrates into the life of the universe, it has 
ower more than any other art to exhibit that life of the 
niverse to the mind and heart of man. I have men- 
oned Aristotle’s description of poetry as “an expres- 
(ge of the universal.’”’ I need to add another profound 
aying of the same philosopher, namely, that eS 
/ more philosophic and of higher worth, than history.” 
he reason is not far to seek. History deals with the 
etual; it has all the defects and limitations of its 

eme. Poetry, on the other hand, sets before us the 


164 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE | 


types and truths of which history furnishes only single, 
and concrete illustrations. | 

Poetry is more universal than history. In it appear: 
the divine ideas purged of excrescences. Compare the! 
characters of Shakespeare’s historical plays with those 
same characters as they appear in the English annals, 
I do not hesitate to say that Shakespeare has seized the 
dominant feature of each character, and has presented 
it more consistently than any historian has; while for 
grasp of the spirit of those turbulent times, their pas- 
sionate loyalty and their barbaric cruelty, and for vivid 
and moving exhibition of the national life and genius, 
the plays leave, and ever will leave, the histories far 
behind. 
While poetry has these ater over philosophy 
and history, there is one kind of poetry which possesses 
them to the utmost, and that is, dramatic poetry. Here 
we have life reconstructed, as it were. Great principles 
of action are set before us, but they animate concrete 
personalities. Types of humanity are consistently de 
lineated, but with natural surroundings. Each mar 
influences, and he receives influence from others. The 
network of circumstance becomes a matrix for the de 
velopment of character. The persons of the drama are 
not only conceived, but they are made to speak, and ir 
speaking, to reveal themselves. Their own acts, ane 
not the descriptions of the poet, approve or condemr 
them. As we read or hear the play, the world seem! 
to lay aside its mask and admit us into its secret. Ou! 
own hearts and the hearts of others are opened to us 
The creative genius of the dramatist has breathed int¢ 
his characters the breath of life, so that they hav 











| 
| 
become living souls, and can never die. To multitudes, 
Othello and Lear, Romeo and Hamlet are more real 
and powerful factors of mental and moral growth, than 
are Cromwell and Napoleon and Washington. 

| The Greek tragedies maintain their hold upon us, 
aven after the lapse of many centuries, because they 
exhibit in noble artistic form the primary affections and 
‘ears of humanity. But in the days of Greece life was 
simple. The complexity of modern interests and feel- 
ngs had not yet arisen. Duty to the family and the 
State was the largest motive to action. The heart of 
man had not become introspective, and the depths of 
passion had not been sounded. The love of man for 
woman and of woman for man was not yet self-con- 
scious, and what we call romance was impossible. 

| The “Christian Era’’ introduces us to a larger world. 
Nature yields in attractiveness to human nature. The 
State is seen to exist for the individual. Not only man 
as a race, but each man of the human family, is the 
dbject of divine regard and self-sacrifice. The single 
soul is the scene of conflicts more impressive than any 
gattle of the elements. To dramatize modern life is a 
yreater task than that which the Greeks had laid upon 
them. To seize upon the great types of character as 
they live and move in this new world without and 
within, and to give these types concrete and consistent 
2xpression as they interact with one another and shape 
fe, other by their interaction, this requires a breadth 
ind vigor of creative imagination such as the Greeks 


DRAMATIC POETRY THE HIGHEST FORM OF ART 165 


1ever possessed. 
Greek art lives, because it has in it an element of 
niversality. The single idea or feeling which a Greek 


166 © THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE % 





















statue or poem embodies is an idea or feeling common | 
to all mankind. But Coriolanus and Shylock anfial 
Henry V. present to us these same ideas and feelings | 
contending with many others, and hastening on, through | 
infinite complexity of circumstance, to triumph or de 
feat. It is because our great poet, more than any other, 
has been able to portray all the secular varieties of 
human character, in the endless relations they sustain 
in modern life, that we can speak of the universality 0: of 
Shakespeare. . 
It is said of Tennyson that a friend found him oo 
day on the edge of a country brook gazing down into its | 
depths and absorbed in contemplating the endless variety _ 
of its subaqueous life. As he lifted his head the poet . 
only said: ‘What an imagination God has!” But the 
brook was only the universe in miniature. He who 
regards the universe as an ordered whole, and sees in it 


One God, who ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 

To which the whole creation moves. 


will be deeply impressed with the wonders of that di | 
vine and creative imagination which constructed the \ 
plot of the great drama of history, and which is con-_ 
ducting the play through all its successive scenes to its 7 
final dénouement and success. ad 

It is the privilege of the poet to enter into God’s plan 1 ‘ 
of the universe and to express God’s thought. Not the - 
actual world, but the ideal of which the actual is the 
shadow, the essence of things disencumbered from the | 
accidents of circumstance, characters clearly unfolded, 


| 
| 
| 


MORE OF TRUTH IN POETRY THAN IN PROSE 167 
























loom fixed by human acts, the meaning of events— 
hese are the things with which the poet deals, and in 
ll this he is prophet as well as poet, anticipator of 
esults, interpreter of God. In his creations, God makes 
umself better known. He lifts us up into the region 
£ eternal truths. Does one man’s line of development 
un on for a while alone, but then suddenly become in- 
‘xtricably tangled in another man’s, whose past history 
jas all unconsciously prepared him for the contact? 
xeorge Eliot will in a similar way give us in one novel 
»oth Gwendolen and Grandcourt, and Shakespeare will 
arry on two separate stories in King Lear which only 
£ the crisis of the play merge into one. 

_ Anachronisms are not to be ruled out in poetry so 
ong as they subserve ideal truth. It required a vivid 
magination to recognize the two rivals for the throne in 
Richard III., encamped so close together on the stage 
hat the same ghost could speak alternately to both. 
gut space and time are annihilated in poetry, because 
yoetry is an expression of the universal. Shall we call 
his a defect in Shakespeare? As well quarrel with 
Raphael for bringing into juxtaposition the top of the 
Mount with its transfigured Saviour, and the foot of the 
Mount with the distressed humanity which he came to 
ave. 

Poetry then has in it, not less’truth, but more truth 
han prose. It seizes upon and expresses the deeper 
acts of life, which the superficial observer neglects. 
Nhen Milton described poetry as “simple, sensuous, 
rassionate,” he meant by “simple” this very conform- 
y to the laws of nature and of mind—simplicity in- 
‘ludes the idea of genuine rationality. But if poetry is 













168 THE. UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


an expression of the highest reason, how comes it that | 
poetry and insanity are so connected together in the 
thoughts of men? Listen to Dryden (“Absalom and. 
Achitophel,” 193) : A 


CR 


Great wits are sure to madness near allied 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide ; 


and to Seneca (“ De Tranquillitate Animti,” 15): “ There | 
is no great genius without a tincture of madness.” 4 

In our judgment this is only to say that an alert and 
active mind may put such a strain upon its cerebral 
organism as to throw the machine into utter disorder, | 
It is easy to “o’er-inform the tenement of clay,” when | 
that tenement is so delicate an instrument as the poet’s: 
brain. A slight jar will sometimes stop a delicate chro) 
nometer, and the most accomplished performer makes” 
sorry music when he plays on a cracked violin. Ophelia’ 
is wrong when she says of Hamlet (3: 1:157): | 


Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, 
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh ; 


for it is not the reason that is out of tune, but the brai is 
The result, however, is the same, and we speak of a rea- | 
son overthrown, as we speak of a conscience seared. ; 

The abnormal imagination may link objects together 
by the most tenuous threads of association. This 
should not blind us to the dignity of its normal exercise,» 


rational and the irrational use of this wonderful facult ri 


UNIVERSALITY INVOLVES IMPERSONALITY 169 


Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 

More than cool reason ever comprehends, 

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 

Are of imagination all compact ; 

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold : 
That is the madman ; the lover, all as frantic, 
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt ; 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
And, as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name. 
















' Since imagination, in its higher rational use, is a 
neans of grasping truth not open to the senses, it is a 
aost important coadjutor, if not a necessary instrument, 
f reason in its loftiest investigations. Neither mathe- 
aatics nor morals can make known their highest truths 
o the man of no imagination. The dull plodder within 
he circle of material facts will discern no connections 
‘etween them, and will have no science. Although God 
3 apprehended not by imagination but by reason, yet 
Magination is a most important help to religion, and we 
tay almost say that some men have not imagination 
nough to be religious. 
The poet can express the universal, only as the uni- 
ersal is in him. We must not think of him simply 
an individual. He is also member of the race, with 
he life of the race pulsating in his veins. When he 
ears “the still, sad music of humanity,” it is because 
umanity speaks to him and in him. Aye, the great- 
t poetry expresses a higher life than that of man. 





a 
. 


170 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


David and Isaiah see divinity in nature and in human | 
affairs, because God in them enables them to see God 
outside of them. This we call inspiration. I do not * 
argue that every poet is inspired, but I do maintain 
that there are lower as well as higher forms of divine 
influence, and that the great works of secular liter- 
ature would never have been possible had not their 
authors gos enlightened by the “Light that lente 
every man.’ 

God’s providence has not left these mighty springs of | 
power without control. As he spoke through Balaam 
and through Caiaphas in spite of their perversity, inter. | 
jecting amid their selfish and profane utterances some 
truths that lived after the falsehoods died, so Goethe in 
his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,’ and Moore in 
” have been made to | 





See 


his ‘Come, ye Disconsolate, 
prophesy against their will. But much more through | 
the greatest poets, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, i 
Wordsworth, must we at times recognize a divine voice | 
speaking. At times the poet is rapt, his words and | 
thought go beyond himself, truth discloses itself to him ‘ 
dressed in a word-garb of supernatural beauty. Her 
wonders at himself, for all this is something not wrought ¢ 
by him but wrought for him. He talks of the Muses, | 
or he gives thanks to God. | 
These considerations explain what we may call re 
impersonality of the greatest poets. What is the | 
motive of their writing? Do they write for pecuniary 
reward? The pressure of poverty, the need of bread / 
for wife or child, the desire to retrieve family misfortune, : 
these have doubtless set many pens a-running, and pos- | 
sibly Shakespeare’s among the rest. Do they write for 








ae 
as 
<2 
—— 













| SHAKESPEARE PARTLY THE PRODUCT OF HIS TIME Laat 


ame? The love of praise and the handing down to 
osterity of a work that cannot die, these have been 
ecasions and helps to poetic art, as even Dante con- 
asses to us. Do they write to do good and to teach 
rankind ? Yes, this has been one motive to artistic 
roduction, and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” seeks to 
justify the ways of God to man.” 
And yet we maintain that no great poetry was ever 
ritten with any one of these as its sole, or even its rul- 
& motive. These may serve as occasions, they may 
ve the pen its start; but, unless the writer is lifted 
dove them, no poem of permanent value is the result. 
or here is no spontaneity and no joy, but rather ex. 
mal or internal constraint. All great poetry is a work 
. freedom, as well as of necessity. The poet creates, 
' God creates, simply to express the world of thought 
id beauty within. The surging life of humanity 
ecomes self-conscious in the poet’s breast. He must 
speak forth the things which he has seen and heard” 
ithout regard to consequence or reward. The great 
vets forget themselves in their themes. We know 
uch of Achilles, but little of Homer. And if Shakes- 
are is the greatest poet of the world, it is not wonder- 
I that this rule should apply to him most of all, and 
at we should know much about Macbeth, but little 
lout Shakespeare. 
We can now perceive the mele truth and error in 
. Taine’s contention that our poet was the child of the 
Maissance. Every great artist is in part the product 
‘his time, and Shakespeare gathered up and expressed 
that there was of rich and rare in that most stirring 
€. The revival of learning reached distant England 


172 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


almost a century after it had begun in Italy, but delay 
only increased the volume and power of the wave. The: 
Reformation had added an ethical and purifying element. 
to what was originally a mere outburst of intellectual 
energy, and the ferocity of medizeval manners had been 
somewhat tamed. The defeat of the Armada had freed, 
England from the fear of Spain; the beheading of the 
Queen of Scots had freed England from internal foes. . 

It was an age of adventure and discovery. The world 
had doubled in size, and transatlantic treasures had been 
poured into the lap of Europe. The Bermudas gave to 
Shakespeare his «still-vexed Bermoothes,”’ and the 
heathen cannibal gave him his Caliban. Imagination) 
was provided with material both modern and classical, 
at the same time that it was emancipated from the) 
superstitions of the past. Elizabeth, the virgin queen,, 
mistress of the seas and commanding the enthusiastic | 
loyalty of her subjects, was a lover and promoter of | 
literature. Never before since the victory of the Greeks, 
over Persia, was a nation so on the top-wave of freedom) 
and achievement. The very breathing of the air was 
exhilaration, and hope could never hope too much in the. 
breast of the poet. | 

What an instrument was then made ready to 1s) 
hand in our English mother-tongue! The Norman had. 
enriched it with all the dignity and sonorous charm of. 
the Latin; the Saxon had furnished its solid foundation: 
of simple, forthright, hearty, pathetic speech. Spenser 
had subdued its harshness ‘into the melody and harmony) 
of poetry ; Sidney had shown how rhythmical and yet 
how vigorous might be its prose. The language was no} 
hack, with regular, funereal gait, but a colt just put to 














- 


oe 
—— ©. 7 
oe 


Me 






i 
| NATURE AS WELL AS NURTURE 173 
yarness, a compound of grace and of intense vitality, 
ready for all manner of sudden excursions from the 
yeaten track. 


| 
| 
: 


_ What we now call word-coining, and occasionally tol- 
‘rate as poetic license, was the business of the Eliza- 
ethan poet, and the new words had all the brilliancy 
ind beauty of counters fresh from the mint. The age 
vad a peculiar feeling for:artistic form—form and sub- 
stance indeed had not yet been divorced. English had 
rot yet acquired the stiffnessof Puritanism. To use the 
words of Lord Bacon, it had the very “sparkle of the 
durity of man’s first estate.” Dramatic poetry had 
yegun to use it for its-vehicle. The coarse and bloody 
ragedies of an earlier time had given place to plays in 
which there was at least some effort at rational develop- 
nent of character, and Shakespeare himself, in alluding 
‘0 Marlowe, could speak of 

| 
| The proud, full sail of his great verse. 
' The poet was born indeed in a mighty time, but the 
ime can never wholly account for the poet. Shakes- 
deare was born, not made;, nurture did much for him, 
yut nature did more. When M. Taine calls him the 
child of the -Renaissance, he forgets that the Renais- 
sance had other children not so great. Ben Jonson, as 
well as Marlowe, had more of Jearning and more of 
ie in the schools. They were children of the 
Renaissance, but they were not Shakespeares. 

| The French critic has little faith in personality. His 
philosophy is the philosophy of materialism: man is the 
product of his surroundings. Against such a philosophy 
Shakespeare, like Homer, will ever be an unanswerable 





et THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 
! 


argument. Here is a new force in history, for which. 
the past cannot account. Humanity reaches a new. 
stage of development in him. The characters which he. 
creates do not belong peculiarly to the Renaissance, 
they belong to universal humanity. Ben Jonson nobly 
recognized the essential quality of Shakespeare’s genius, | 
when he declared his work to be “not of an age, but 
tor alletime:? | 

And this suggests the final and sufficient reason vill 








the plays of our great dramatist can never be referred | 
to Lord Bacon as their author. Bacon was the child of | 
the Renaissance. He represents the critical and inquir- 
ing spirit. His aim was to bring philosophy down from. 
its ideal heights, and to set it at study of concrete facts, 
He could doubtless have adopted Luther’s characteriza- 
tion of Aristotle as “a damned mischief-making heathen.” | 
There is probably in all literature no greater contrast of | 
method and spirit than that between Shakespeare's | 
intuitive grasp of human character and life on the 
one hand and Bacon’s careful gathering of instances 
and induction of generals from particulars on the other, - 
The “final causes” which Aristotle taught, and which 
Bacon hated, were the very life-blood of Shakespeare, | 
To fancy Francis of Verulam writing “Midsummer | 
Night’s Dream” or “The Tempest” is to imaginea 
dray-horse soaring like Pegasus. | 
The education of such a genius must have been a 
course of liberal training to those who taught him. So- 
active and aspiring a mind, with his manifold questions, — 
must have made trouble for the doctors in the temple. 
It is by no means certain that he did much of regular 
study at the Free Grammar School of Stratford, but his 


— 


_————— 








ae oe 








A YOUTH NOT WILD AND DISSOLUTE 175 
recasional introduction of Latin lines, and especially his 
tse of words derived from the Latin in a new and ety- 
Bogical sense, show that he picked up that language 
a very practical way. And though he is said to have 
ad less Greek than Latin, I cannot explain the long 
uccession of questions and answers in single lines of 
‘King Richard III.” except by supposing that these 
1onostichs were suggested. by the reading of Euripides, 
r by overhearing the recitation of it in the schoolroom. 
_ When it comes to the writing of «“ Antony and Cleo- 
atra,’ or “ Troilus and Cressida,” we find that Shakes- 
Bre has drunk in the very spirit and genius of Greek 
nd Roman times ; indeed, in his portraiture of Ulysses, 
e takes Homer’s hints about the man of many wiles, 
nd makes Ulysses reveal himself in speech with a full- 
ess and consistency of which Homer himself would 
ave been incapable. 
Schools or no schools, Shakespeare would have appro- 
tiated, and he did appropriate, all the secular knowledge 
f his time. Essays have been written to prove that he 
rust have been at different times a lawyer, a physician, 
ad a soldier. He probably was none of them. May 
€ not reasonably believe that he tells the fae of his 
wn mental growth when, in « Cymbeline”’ (1 : 1 : 43), 
2 makes a gentleman say of Posthumus, that ne king 





Puts him to all the learnings ‘that his time 
Could make him the receiver of ; which he took 
As we do air, fast as ’twas ministered ; 

And in his spring became a harvest. 


In a similar way we may interpret what seem at first 
ght to be intimations of a wild and dissolute youth. 























176 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


They are rather signs of an omnivorous appetite for 
knowledge. With a poet’s delight in every novel ex 
perience, he threw himself into life. But he did not 
throw himself away. Keenly sensitive as he was to 
pleasure, he had yet the justness of judgment whi 
enabled him to hold his spirit above the temptatio 18 
and companionships which would have dragged é | 
down. With a largeness of heart like the sand upon 
the seashore, he could master everything, yet be mas: 
tered by none. rc 

Greene might drink himself to death and Marlowe 
might perish in a brawl, but Shakespeare never. y 
delicacy of taste was there which revolted from the vile 
A conscience yet unseared discerned between the evi 
and the good. The “Venus and Adonis”’ does not prove 
Shakespeare’s early manhood to have been swallowed 
up in sensuality, any more than the ‘“ Laus Veneris” of! 
Swinburne proved him to be a youthful reprobate. At 

Hazardous and guilty as are these edgings toward! 
vice, we might yet in all candor believe that the vice is 
like the bacchanalian songs of our college days, rathe 
an ideal than a real thing, a matter of theory rather thal 
of practice. It is the ill-chosen theme for intellectua 
subtlety to disport itself upon. Real vice is too muel 
absorbed in its own viciousness to be self-observant and | 
poetical. To those who accuse him too harshly, Shakes- 
peare may use Warwick’s extenuation of Prince Hal 
fondness for wild associates (‘King Henry IV.,’ | 


IT, 4: 4:67): 
My gracious lord, you look beyond him quite : 


The prince but studies his companions, 
Like a strange tongue ; wherein, to gain the language, 


A YOUTH NOT WILD AND DISSOLUTE WEF: 


*Tis needful that the most immodest word 

Be looked upon, and learned ; which once attained 
Your highness knows, comes to no further use, 

But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms, 
The prince will, in the perfectness of time, 

Cast off his followers ; and their memory 

Shall as a pattern or a measure live, 

By which his grace must mete the lives of others, 
Turning past evils to advantages. 


+] 


















Another theory, I know, is quite possible, namely, that 
a early manhood of license was rescued from utter dis- 
ster only by disappointment in illicit love, the treachery 
chosen friends, and the death of the poet’s father 
ad son. Let us unhesitatingly accept the facts, while 
€ reject the inference drawn from them. As to the 
ference, it is enough to say that it is impossible to 
Ippose even the genius of Shakespeare to have made 
S steady progress toward the summit of literary and 
‘famatic achievements through years of recklessness 
id dissipation. Genius needs material to work upon, 
id that material must be gathered by labor. Disap- 
intment, treachery, and death taught Shakespeare 
any lessons; but they never turned sottishness into 
dustry, nor passion into wisdom. 

Prof. Dowden, of the University of Dublin, has done 
ore than any or all of the writers before him to give 
rational and connected account of the poet’s life and 
ork. The year 1600 is marked as the middle point of 
productive activity. The ten years preceding 1600 
ere the years that saw the rise and maturing of his 
mius. The ten years that followed 1600 were the 
ars of his grandest triumphs. The twenty years be- 


feen 1590 and 1610, therefore, cover the whole extent 
M , 

























ies! THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


of Shakespeare’s writing for the stage. But each te r 
years of these twenty may be further subdivided inte 
halves, and these minor five-year periods may be roughly ) 
yet substantially distinguished from each other. Prof, 
Dowden has well named these four minor periods) 
(1) “In the workshop”; (2) “In the world” ; (3) “ Ow 
of the depths”; (4) “On the heights.” * 

Let us follow this order for a moment, and get from 
it what help we may toward understanding the develop 
ment of Shakespeare’s genius. We shall see that the 
poet did not attain his supremacy at once. Universality 
was not to be reached at a bound. First came the year 
of apprenticeship, in which imagination almost ran riot, 
In Romeo and Titania there was sweetness in excess 
All was regularity and rhyme. Quips and conceit 
abounded. The play upon words was incessant. Shakes 
peare was in large part working over the dramas of others 

The three parts of “King Henry VI.,” and perhapt 
also “Richard III.,” were adaptations and improve) 
ments of earlier productions, whose original authors, 
though they were associated with him in the busines: 
of making plays, could yet enviously speak of him af) 
an “upstart crow, beautified with their feathers.” iy 
these playwrights live now only by virtue of the breat 
which Shakespeare breathed into them. While the poe! 
used the material they gave him, he so transformed 
that the authors could hardly recognize it. Eve 
those early days of experiment, he put into his work 
vivacity, a variety, a truth, and a beauty, which wert 
altogether new in dramatic literature. 

The five years “in the workshop ” were succeeded by 
five years “in the world.” He began to dispense will 


THE FIRST TWO PERIODS OF PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY 179 


e 


he collaboration of others, and to do wholly indepen- 
lent work. Beginning to write mainly as a matter of 
rade, he found the trade become profitable, and the 
nore original his productions were, the more money they 
ought in. The family star, which had been declining, 
ame into the ascendant once more. In 1596 John 
shakespeare, his father, who had been prosecuted for 
lebt and had lost his estate, applied for liberty to dis- 
lay a coat-of-arms, and in 1597 the poet purchased 
New Place in Stratford for a family mansion. In 1598 
"rancis Meres, in his “ Wit’s Treasury,” bore testimony 
0 the poet's established fame, and gave him the highest 
lace among English poets and dramatists, while de- 
laring him equal to the greatest writers of tragedy or 
omedy in Greece and Rome. 

' Success encouraged him to further and bolder effort. 
fe flung away the traditional restrictions of dramatic 
oetry. End-stopped and periodic lines, with their mo- 
otonous uniformity of cadence, gave place to run-on 
nes, with frequent weak endings, and a wonderful 
ariety in the location of the czsural pause. The pro- 
ygue to « King Henry V.” illustrates the new freedom 
nd unbounded energy which Shakespeare put into his 
erse. There the chorus begins: 

















O for a muse of fire, that would ascend 

The brightest heaven of invention ! 

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, 

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene ! 

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, 

Assume the port of Mars ; and at his heels, 

Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire 
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, 

The flat unraiséd spirit that hath dar’ d 


180 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE | 
. 


On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth 

So great an object : can this cockpit hold 
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram 
Within this wooden O the very casques 
That did affright the air at Agincourt ? 


This magnificent passage illustrates not only the new 
splendor and freedom which Shakespeare gave to dra- 
matic verse; it illustrates equally well the realistic 
quality of his second literary period. It is as if he 
had said to himself: “I have done with conceits and 
fancies; let me deal with real life.” The five years 
“in the world” are represented by the “ Merchant of 
Venice” and by the long series of English historical 
plays. Eight of these last follow one another in un 
broken connection. From the fact that no one play is 
absolutely complete in itself, we may infer that Shakes: 
peare intended them to constitute parts of one great 
heroic poem, in which English history, with its shame 
and its glory, should live again before the eyes of men, 

The historical plays are a mirror of kings, it has beer 
said, and they should be a pattern for princes. But he 
must be a very kingly king who can live up to the dig) 
nity and strength of either Shakespeare’s “ Henry IV.’ 
or “Henry V.” No warnings against romantic weak 
ness in a monarch can be so impressive as a reading 0 
« King Richard II.”’; no warnings against pietistic weak 
ness so powerful as a representation of “King Henry 
VI.” It is striking that the plays which depict roya 
imbecility belong to the earliest period of the poet’: 
development, while those which depict royal greatnes 
and strength belong to the second period of his growins 
maturity and larger knowledge of the world. He ha’ 








| 

| 

| THE LAST TWO STAGES OF HIS PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY 181 
‘so thought himself into the spirit and temper of a king, 
that he has made the actor’s task a hard one. Those 
parts can be fitly acted only by princes, or by men 
whose imagination enables them to enter into the uni- 
versality of Shakespeare. 

And now, with the year 1600 and the ripe confidence 

‘of his manhood, come vicissitudes and sorrows which 
turn the poet’s thoughts inward and lead him to medi- 
tate deeply upon the great problems of existence. The 
‘sonnets belong to this period of Sturm und Drang. 
‘Shakespeare’s father and Shakespeare’s only son have 
‘died. The treachery of a trusted friend has wounded 
‘him to the quick. The lightness of spirit which met 
openly and joyfully every youthful disappointment has 
given place for the time to a sombre view of life. The 
capacity of the human heart for grief and anger and fear 
‘is opened to him as never before. The third five years 
are well characterized by the words, “Out of the 
depths.” 

1600 to 1605 must be regarded as the most produc- 
tive half-decade in the history of literature. For during 
this half-decade were produced “ Antony and Cleopatra,” 

Hamlet,’ ‘Lear,’ “Macbeth,” “Othello,” and “ Corio- 
lanus.” Here are the six greatest tragedies of the world. 
They represent the excessive working of the greatest 
passions. In “Antony and Cleopatra” we see sensual 
‘pleasure dragging down a noble mind and heart; in 
“Macbeth” it is ambition; in “Othello” jealousy ; in 
“Coriolanus”’ pride. ‘Lear’ shows us the human spirit 
driven to insanity by filial ingratitude; “Hamlet’’ is 
‘the impersonation of idealistic wavering in the presence 
of duty, and of opportunity forever lost. 





182 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


But how different these embodiments of human pas. 
sion and weakness are from the shadowy abstractions of! 
Marlowe and Ben Johnson! Those were lay-figures with: 
a mere outside dress of passion. They went through’ 
their appointed motions like automata, but they had no | 
real life. Shakespeare’s characters have such intense 
vitality that we discuss their motives and actions as if 
they were living men. We see the human heart fairly’ 
torn by contending emotions. And yet, dark as the. 
colors often are, reflection only convinces us that in| 
these creations nature herself is speaking. 

There were also comedies belonging to this third’ 
period of Shakespeare’s productive activity, but they 
were not light and mirthful like those of the period 
preceding. We find no “Merry Wives of Windsor,” | 
no “Much Ado About Nothing,” no “As You Like It? | 
between 1600 and 1605. “ Measure for Measure,” « All's 
Well That Ends: Well,” and “Troilus and Cressida,’ are} 
products of this stage of the poet’s genius. The comedy 
is ironical and bitter. It deals with misjudgment and! 
treachery. 

It is pleasant to pass from the third period to the last. | 
The five years from 1605 to 1610 were years of restored | 
calm, of forgiveness, of reconciliation. It is the serene’ 
Indian summer of the poet’s days. ‘Cymbeline,” “The 
Winter’s Tale,” and “The Tempest,” with their stories! 
of wrongs righted, of repentance for transgression, of. 
sunny and large-minded charity, were the fruit of these! 
later years of Shakespeare. His leaf had not begun to! 
wither ; it was not even sere and yellow. He was only 
in his ripe manhood, for he was but fifty-two when he’ 
died. | 











DID SHAKESPEARE APPRECIATE HIS OWN GENIUS? 183 


] 


He had attained a competence and had retired to 
enjoy it. He was the foremost citizen of Stratford. If 
there had been estrangement from his family, this came 
now to an end. His pre-eminence as a dramatist and a 
poet was universally acknowledged. The shallow criti- 
cism of a succeeding age had not yet begun to dim his 
fame. He seems now to have written little, and what he 
did write was written rather to satisfy an inner impulse 
than to meet any outward demand. Prospero, in “ The 
Tempest,” might almost seem to be the poet’s picture 
of himself in this golden harvest-time of his life, and 
many have seen, in the last words of Prospero, Shakes- 
peare’s own farewell to dramatic composition (“Tem- 
Mest, 5:1:50): 

This rough magic 
I here abjure ; and, when I have requir'd 
Some heavenly music (which even now I do), 
To work mine end upon their senses that 
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, 
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, 


And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, 
I'll drown my book. 


_ Did the poet fully appreciate his own genius? He 
seems to have taken little pains to correct his plays 
or to prepare them for the press. In devising to his 
— Judith and Susanna, the various portions of 
his estate, there is no mention of his interest in the 
plays, nor any provision for their editing or publication. 
We owe the preservation of some of these dramas to 
Shakespeare’s fellow-actors; but for their care the 
plays might have perished. 

It is not correct to say that carelessness on the part 


184 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 








of the author was characteristic of that age, for Ben 
Jonson spent no end of time in revising and printing! 
his writings. It is possible, of course, that Shakes: 
peare’s will expressed only a portion of his mind ; when 
he made it he may not have expected soon to die; stil 
it remains a mystery why he should have disposed of 
other portions of his estate, yet should have given n¢ 
thought to this. It is possible that he hoped for still 
many years to do the work of revision in; in fact, the 
copies in possession of the Globe Theater, which was 
destroyed by fire soon after Shakespeare's death, may 
have borne marks of a revision already begun. | 

But all this is mere hypothesis. I have already inti: 
mated what seems to me the preferable explanation. If! 
connects itself with my special theme. The greatest, 
poets are impersonal. Like John the Baptist they come 


i 


to regard themselves as voices of a higher Intelligence; 
and they leave their work to God. Shakespeare ap} 
pears to have been peculiarly self-forgetful. The most) 
characteristic epithet that has come down to us from} 
his own age is that one which Ben Jonson applied te 
him when he called him “gentle Shakespeare.” The 
naturally shy and sensitive spirit has an ideal so high 
that, after its noblest achievements, it only desires te 
get away from them. Praise tires, because the poet 1s 
too conscious of his defects to listen to it. If there is 
any worth in his song, posterity will discover it ane 
celebrate it without special care of his. | 

It confirms this view when we find that it was not 
the plays that Shakespeare prided himself upon, but the 
measured poems, like “Lucrece” and the “Sonnets.” 


Never did he wholly free himself from the feeling that 


t 
y 
| 











| CONCESSIONS TO THE TASTES OF THE VULGAR 185 


Tramatic poetry was not poetry at all, but a mere make- 
shift to amuse the crowd. The writing of plays was 
slosely connected with the acting of them; he had 
entered upon it in the way of business, but a stigma 
was attached to the profession; it was relief and luxury 
when he could break completely the ties that bound 
him to the stage. He mourns in the “Sonnets” (111) 
that the actor’s calling has infected him: 


O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 

That did not better for my life provide 

Than public means, which public manners breeds. 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. 


There are no predictions of immortality for the plays. 
It is only in the “Sonnets” (107) that we read: 


Now with the drops of this most balmy time 
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, 
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, 

) While he insults o’ er dull and speechless tribes ; 

| And thou in this shalt find thy monument 

L When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent. 


I must believe that many palpable defects in the 
plays were concesssions to the taste of the vulgar. 
The drama before Shakespeare’s time had appealed to 
the savage instincts of human nature. Bloody scenes 
were enacted. Obscenity and ferocity went hand in 
hand. The shudder, which some of our modern novel- 
ists and playwrights are striving to introduce again into 
literature, was a test of dramatic art in the ante-Eliza- 
bethan times. 


186 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 






I cannot think that the same hand which pennec. 
«Venus and Adonis,” with its marvelous finish and sweet! 
ness, could have willingly written the brutalities of “Titus 
Andronicus.” Yet “Titus Andronicus” is probably 
Shakespeare’s first dramatic production—at any rate he 
had a hand in the writing of it. It is proof of his con’ 
stant advance toward ideal standards, that the harrow. 
ing and the frightful have a continually smaller place as 
he gains in experience and wisdom. 

Though even in “ King Lear,” a work of his thire 
and noblest period, Cornwall is made in full sight of the 
audience to pluck out the eyes of the earl of Gloster; 
this is the single and exceptional instance of such 
cruelty in Shakespeare’s plays. He sees, in general, 
how foreign to real art is the appeal to the sensual or 
the brutal. Through his whole artistic life he is making! 
progress toward that universality of poetic judgment 
which addresses the deepest, noblest, most permanent 
emotions of humanity. Shakespeare began by showing 
to a barbaric time its own likeness ; he ended by rising} 
above his time, and by exhibiting to it the ideal truth) 
and beauty which lie at the heart of the universe. | 

I have taken the word universality as a key to unlock} 
the mystery of Shakespeare. By universality I do not 
mean the poet’s currency or popularity in all places and 
times—that may depend, not upon the poet, but upon 
the education and insight of those who read him. By 
universality I mean something belonging to the poet 
himself, namely, his grasp of elements which are not 
individual or local, but which are common to hummel 
nature everywhere. There are three great ranges Of 
production in. which Shakespeare’s imagination stands 








. MEANING OF THE WORD UNIVERSALITY 187 
supreme. As a creator, first of character, secondly of 


magery, and thirdly of diction, he is the greatest of the 
ons of men. In these three things he holds undis- 
uted mastery, simply because in each case his imagi- 
yation works with incomparable ease and spontaneity 
winder the law of reason and of truth. 
_In order to comprehend the universal element in 
shakespeare’s creation of character, it will be useful to 
ake one of the earlier and one of the later plays, and 
(0 observe some of those facts of structure which the 
tommon reader only vaguely apprehends, but which 
ifter all are their chief sources of power. I take “ King 
Richard III." and ‘Macbeth,’ partly because they 
epresent the historical and the ideal drama respectively, 
yut also for the reason that I can here follow and call 
ittention to the suggestions of Moulton, in his admira- 
jle work on “Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist.” 
“Richard III.”’ has probably been the most popular 
jlay of the dramatic stage. It never fails to entrance 
he galleries. Some have fancied this the result of its 
very violence. So great a critic as James Russell Low- 
‘ll has thrown doubts upon its Shakespearean author- 
ihip, for the reason that it lacks in subtlety of poetic 
*xpression, in humor, and in eloquence.. We must grant 
hat these qualities of style are not seen at their best in 
‘Richard III.” Let us remember, however, that plot 
Ss as much a criterion of greatness as is style. The 
slot of “King Richard” has merits so great that we can 
ittribute the play to none but Shakespeare, while at the 
same time we see in it only the glow of a morning 
hose meridian splendor is to be found in such a 
mwagedy as “Macbeth.” A comparison of these two 


{ 


188 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE | 


plays will illustrate what we mean py the poet’s uni 
sality, at the same time that it shows his prograg 
toward this universality. | 

“King Richard III.” is Shakespeare’s complete an 
ideal villain. Richard has no such excuse as Iago hag 
—the excuse that others have been unfaithful to him 
He devotes himself deliberately to villainy as the on 
method in which, despite his physical deformity, he ca 
show his power. He is a villain, a conscious and cor 
fessed villain, at the start. The play shows no develo 
ment of character; it is only a progressive revelation c 
character already formed. 

There is no complexity of story. No other person C 
the drama attracts special interest or diverts attentio: 
from its one hero. And Richard is a hero only ij 
wickedness. His intensity of evil will, and his almos 








supernatural skill in the accomplishment of his purposes 
fascinate us almost as we are fascinated by Milton’ 
«Satan’’; indeed, some have fancied that Milton tool 
from this character of Shakespeare’s some of the fea! 
tures of his “archangel ruined.” But Richard has ele 
ments which belong to Goethe’s “Mephistopheles,” a’ 
well as to Milton’s “Satan.” He is the sneering, ironi 
cal, and humorous, as well as the hypocritical, proud 
and malignant, devil. 

He glories in his mastery over men, but especially in 
his deception of women. With unblushing effronter: 
he can court and win Lady Anne, the widow of Edwar¢ 
Prince of Wales, whom he himself had stabbed on th: 
field of Tewksbury, and he can court and win her besid! 
the coffin of King Henry VI., her husband’s fathe 
whom he had murdered in the Tower. His conques’ 





| 


| 
| 
| CHARACTER MANIFESTED 189 
seems a piece of hideous necromancy, but Richard 
zloats over it. No qualms disturb him. Conscience is 
aid to sleep. Evil has become his good. He makes 
nerry Over Chiinc me LLemistaneartistiin iniquity. . He 


mes (Henry VI.,~ Part III, 3: 2: 165): 


This earth affords no joy to me, 
But to command, to check, to o’erbear such 
As are of better person than myself. 


Almost to the very end, his course seems an unbroken 
success. Before his devilish deceit and murderous 
cruelty every obstacle gives way. “Without remorse 
or dread,” he “ wades through blood and slaughter to a 
throne.’ Clarence and Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, 
Hastings and Buckingham, are brought to their deaths, 
Queen Anne is poisoned, and the young princes are 
smothered in the Tower. All this would too greatly 
shock the moral sense, if there were not some premoni- 
tions of avenging Justice. The poet could not connect 
these premonitions too closely with Richard, lest the 
dramatic pictures of his resistless will and unchecked 
wickedness should lose a part of their hold upon the 
imagination. For a long time Nemesis is seen only in 
the case of the minor characters. Clarence and Rivers, 
Grey and Vaughan, Hastings and Buckingham, who 
have played into his hands and have abetted his crimes, 
each and all successively recognize in their doom the 
just reward of their past faithlessness or ambition. 
Their deaths are mutterings of distant thunder which 
portend a storm. 

At last the storm breaks. Richard’s very success in 
iniquity prepares for him a more sudden and overwhelm- 


I9g0 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


ing ruin. Conscience, kept muzzled in his waking houll 
now gnaws his heart in sleep. The ghosts of those 
whom he has murdered, after having risen to torment 
him with predictions of defeat, sit heavy on his soul ir 
the hour of battle. After incredible efforts of desper 
ate valor, he utterly succumbs. In his agony of feaj 
he would give his kingdom for a horse. But flight can: 
not save him. His crimes and the crimes of the house 
of York meet their recompense. From the dead tem 
ples of the bloody wretch the crown is plucked to gract 
the brows of Richmond, the representative of Lancas. 
ter, and settled peace comes once more under his reigt 
as the seventh Henry. Nemesis has come at last. The 
mills of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding 
small, and “ King Richard III.” will ever be one of the 
most impressive of the world’s sermons upon the puni 
tive justice of God. | 

Here is unity of dramatic action, depth of thought! 
rapidity of movement, and a fiery energy of expression 
such as belong to Shakespeare alone. And yet “ King 
Richard III.” shows us the poet not yet master of his 
art, and a study of the tragedy of “ Macbeth ” will teack 
us how vast was the interval between the poet’s earliei 
and his later works. Compared with the breadth o} 
“Macbeth,” “Richard” is narrow; while the early play 
is simple, the latter is complex. While in the one the 
only character is Richard, in the other Duncan, Mac: 
duff, and Lady Macbeth are strongly differentiated, anc) 
each plays a part in its way as influential as that ol 
Macbeth himself. 

Richard is a full-grown monster at the beginning’ 
We know from the first, for he himself tells us, what he 











CHARACTER DEVELOPED IOI 


lis to be. But in “Macbeth” we see all the dreadful 
growth of evil from its earliest suggestion to its final 
and absolute domination of the nature. The inner 
workings of passion, the stifling of pity, the hell-fire of 
‘remorse, are depicted as nowhere else in literature. 
In the earlier drama the poet plays, as it were, upon 
one instrument. The compass and variety are small. 
In the later drama he has learned to direct an orchestra, 
to develop a theme, to interlace one musical motive with 
another, to organize many forms of emotional expres- 
‘sion into one grand and overwhelming harmony. We 
‘recognize in both plays the same Shakespeare, but in 
Richard ITI.” the poet seems to look down upon human 
mature from the village spire, while in “ Macbeth” he 
‘stands upon the mountain top and the whole world of 
humanity is spread out before him. 

Let us compare the Nemesis in “ Macbeth” with the 


Nemesis in “Richard.” The witches are supernatural 
‘agents of evil who can suggest, but who cannot origi- 
/mate, man’s evil decision. Macbeth (1 : 3: 122) has his 


warning from Banquo: 

| ’Tis strange : 

_ And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, 
The instruments of darkness tell us truths, 
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us 


In deepest consequence. 


But the warning neglected, the temptation cherished, 
‘principle undermined, there is a surrender of free-will to 
'Satan, and thenceforth an ever-accelerating course of 
self-depravation and self-destruction. And sin becomes 
its own detecter, judge, and tormentor. 

Up to the moment of his coronation, Macbeth is un- 















192 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


suspected ; his crime seems to have run a successful 
course. But crime begets crime. To free himself from 
the penalty of the first, he commits a second. As 
Schiller has well said : 


This is the penalty of evil deed, 
That of new evil it becomes the seed. 


And the second crime of murdering Banquo opens t¢ 
all eyes the first crime of murdering Duncan. The ris¢ 
of Macbeth’s fortunes through the first half of the play 
is succeeded by decline through successive stages til 
he reaches his miserable end. Vaulting ambition has 
o’erleaped itself. Efforts to escape destiny are mad¢ 
the very means of fulfilling it. The wicked man & 
holden in the cords of his own sins. With awful irony 
the malignant powers that at the first lured him to evi 
mock at his calamity, until in his despair he cries (5. 
eeere hey Pe : 
And be these juggling fiends no more believed, 
That palter with us in a double sense ; 


That keep the word of promise to our ear, 
And break it to our hope! 


How much more profound and tragic than anything 
in King Richard’s calm and open espousal of evil is thi 
deception and irony of sin in Macbeth! But even her 
we have a variety of portraiture. Macbeth and Lad 
Macbeth present a contrast to which we find no likenes 
in the earlier play. Here ambition, murder, remorse 
are seen working themselves out in two different na 
tures, the one the impulsive and practical man of action 
the other the woman of thought and will who has com 
mitted herself to her husband’s purpose, and who um 


| 


| ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS 193 


sexes herself in order to nerve him to the deed. He 
has superstitious faith in the witches, and fear of Ban- 
quo’s ghost. She has argued herself out of such faith 
and fear, and sees in supernatural appearances only 
reflections of ambitious hopes and remorseful feelings. 

The man of action cannot bear suspense, and rushes 
headlong into new crime and into consequent self-dis- 
closure. She can wait and conceal and plan, while he 
is powerless. But the nervous tension is too great. 
Nemesis overtakes her in the shape of madness, and her 
madness is a long confession. ‘“ Here’s the smell of the 
blood still,” gasps out the night-walking queen ; “all the 
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” 
And the madness ends in suicide. 

But the Nemesis of Macbeth comes in the shape 
of infatuation. He blindly trusts the oracle, even while 
his foes are gathering for his destruction. He cries 


ie. 3: 32): 


Pll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack’d. . . 
Send out more horses, skirr the country round ; 
Hang those that talk of fear. Give me my armor! 


And when the falsity of his supernatural tempters is 
revealed to him, he flings himself desperately into the 
battle. He meets his death, but his death is virtual 
suicide, and his suicide is virtual confession. 

| Ido not see how any one can read the tragedies with- 
out perceiving that Shakespeare is one of the greatest 
of ethical teachers. And what is true of these tragedies 
is true of his work in general, it wakens a response in 
he deepest heart of man. But not because the poet 


had any set purpose to be a moral teacher. All this is 
) N 


! 


194 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


incidental. He aims only to depict life, to show man t 
himself, to exhibit human nature with its love, its hate 
its hope, its fear. But all the more powerful is Shakes 
peare’s testimony to the supremacy of conscience 1, 
the moral constitution of man. | 

The same remarks apply to Shakespeare’s treatmen| 
of religion and doctrine. He has not set himself t, 
propound dogmas. Whether he was Romanist or Prot 
estant no one can surely tell; the most that we can sa 
is that he disliked Puritanism, and made it once or twic 
the subject of a casual jest. Homer and Virgil, Dant 
and Milton, had each his heaven and his hell, and eac| 
described without hesitation the unseen world. Br 
Shakespeare has no heaven and no hell; he deals onl 
with this present life; even his ghosts and witches te| 
us nothing of the life beyond—they are forbidden t 
tell the secrets of the prison house, and only intimat: 
that they “could a tale unfold, whose lightest word woul, 
harrow up the soul” (“Fiamlet, 1s: 5003) aur ere 
dramatist is the poet of the secular and not of the relig 
ious, of the temporal and not of the eternal. 

Here is the limitation of his universality. As Schere 
has said: ‘It is on the boundaries of the invisible worl) 
that Shakespeare’s vision fails.” But he has, notwitl) 
standing, the most sane and level apprehension of th! 
relations of this life, and his testimony to Christian trutl) 
like his testimony to the ethical facts of remorse an| 
retribution, is all the more valuable because unintentiot; 
ally given. Let us inquire what this testimony is, an| 
what doctrines of our faith derive confirmation from 1? 
In treating this portion of my theme I avail myself t 
some extent of the references given so copiously i 





NEITHER NATURALISTIC NOR AGNOSTIC 195 


Bishop Wordsworth’s excellent book on “Shakespeare 
and the Bible.” 

_ Though Shakespeare does not profess to teach theol- 
ogy, it is not because he has no theology, nor because 
he regards theology as an impossibility to man. He is 
not an agnostic. He distinctly maintains the reality 
and the value, while he confesses the limitations, of our 
knowledge of God and his relations to the universe. In 
the second part of “King Henry VI.” (4: 7:67), he 
tells us that 


Ignorance is the curse of God, 
Knowledge, the wing wherewith we fly to heaven, 


qn “ Antony and Cleopatra” (1 : 2 : 8) he says: 


In nature’s infinite book of secrecy 


a A little I can read. 


~ He does’ not hold the naturalistic, any more than he 
holds the agnostic, view of the universe. In “ All’s Well 
That Ends Well” (2: 3: 1) he makes Lafeu, the wise 
man of the play, ae himself as follows: ‘They say 
miracles are past; and we have our philosophical per- 
sons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural 
and causeless. Hence it is, that we make trifles of ter- 
Tors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, 
when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” 
_ We should expect that this poet of secular life would 
find in human nature the main source of his knowledge 
of God. And so it is, for he calls man “the image 
Omehis Maker” (“King Henry VIII.,” 3 : 2 : 440). 
God is a God of justice. In “Measure for Measure” 
(2: 2:76) God is cailed “the top of judgment.” Yet 


196 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 






God is also merciful. In “Titus Andronicus” (1:1? 
117) we read: 


Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? 
Draw near them then in being merciful. 


Shakespeare’s noblest and completest delineation of 
female character is that of Portia in the ‘“ Merchant of 
Venice.” When Portia sits as doctor of laws and legal 
adviser of the Duke, we hear from her lips the mingled 
praise of justice and mercy, and we have an unequaled 
passage in which the conceptions of the two attributes 
are so combined that the one qualifies and heightens the 


other (4: 1: 175): | 


The quality of mercy is not [con] strained ; 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven | 
Upon the place beneath : it is twice bless’ d, 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: e| 
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest ; it becomes | 
The throned monarch better than his crown ; 
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, j 
The attribute to awe and majesty, 
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings ; 
But mercy is above this sceptred sway, 
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings : 
It is an attribute to God himself ; | 
And earthly power doth then show likest God's, 
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, 
Though justice be thy plea, consider this, — 
That, in the course of justice, none of us 

Should see salvation ; we do pray for mercy, 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy. 





Such is the poet’s view of the divine nature. Wha 
now is his view of human nature? Is man the victin 





MAN’S FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 197 





| of heredity and environment? The only reply is, that 
‘man has moral freedom ; that he may do the right and 
avoid the wrong. The citizen in “Coriolanus” (2: 3 : 3), 
| when told that he may do an unjust thing, replies: “We 
have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that 
we have no power to do.” And in “Twelfth Night” 
(3:4: 351), Antonio protests : 


In nature there’s no blemish but the mind ; 
None can be call’d deform’d but the unkind. 
Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil 

z Are empty trunks o’erflourish’d by the devil. 


As men have freedom, they cannot lay the blame of 
their transgression either upon nature or upon God. 
Edmund, the double-dyed villain in “King Lear” (1: 2: 

108), acknowledges that this is only the insincere apol- 
ogy of the guilty + 


This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are 
sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make 
guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars ; as if we 
were villains of necessity ; fools by heavenly compulsion ; knaves, 
thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance ; drunkards, 
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary in- 
fluence ; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. 


In “All’s Well That Ends Well” (1:1: 155) Helena 
| declares : 


Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, 

Which we ascribe to heaven ; the fated sky 
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull 
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull ; 


and in “Julius Czesar” (1 : 2: 135), Cassius says nobly 


) 


198 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


Men at some time are masters of their fates ; 
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. 








Dr. Flint in his essay on “Theism”’ has well said that 
“Where the will is without energy, and rest is longed) 
for as the end of existence, as among the Hindus, there 
is a marked inability to think of God as cause or will, 
and a constant tendency to pantheism.”’ We only utter. 
the complementary truth when we say that where the| 
will is a bounding activity of individual and national life, 
there is always a strong conviction of the personality of, 
God and the freedom of man. This is peculiarly true| 
of the Elizabethan age, and it is markedly seen in} 
Shakespeare, its noblest writer. Man is capable of} 
good, but he is also capable of freely willing evil. 

Robert G. Ingersoll, in his lecture on Shakespeare,| 
represents the poet as holding that crime is only the 
result of ignorance. Shakespeare holds precisely the 
opposite. With him, “the wish is father to the thought”, 
(“King Henry IV.,” Part IL, 4: 5 : 93), not the thought| 
father to the wish. Says Suffolk (“King Henry VI.,”) 
Partelenoe: 7 aay) | 


Faith, I have been a truant in the law, 
And never yet could frame my will to it, 
And therefore frame the law unto my will. | 






And Troilus (“Troilus and Cressida,” 4:4: 94) witnesses 
that | 


Sometimes we are devils to ourselves, 
When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, 1 
Presuming on their changeful potency. ‘| 








\ 





CRIME IS NOT THE RESULT OF IGNORANCE 199 


The angels fell by ambition (“King Henry VIII,” 3:2: 
439), and man too laliswuKemimucier, (/dem, 3) 22¢: 
+369). 

_ Sin begins in the abuse of free-will, but by that abuse 
‘man makes himself a slave. One sin leads to another. 
Says Pericles (We teh 37)-: 


One sin, I know, another doth provoke ; 
Murder’s as near to lust, as flame to smoke. 


and Richard III. confesses (4 : 2 : 63): 


I am in 
So far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin. 


This sin may come to be a fixed state of obstinate self- 
assertion, an-apotheosis of self, that defies both God 
and man. Coriolanus (5 : 4 : 23) “wants nothing of a 


god but eternity and a heaven to throne in;” “there is 
no more mercy in him than there is ail in a male 
tiger.” 


In “ Richard III.” and in “ Macbeth” we have Shakes- 
peare’s representations of Audris, the one unpardonable 
sin of the Greek tragedy. Iago too is a willful hater of 
all good, and Goneril and Regan show that human 
‘nature may consciously and deliberately surrender itself 
to evil. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these 
Yard hearts?” inquires Lear (3:7:75). The sug- 
gested answer is, that what nature never did, and never 
could do, man’s evil will has done; he has so perverted 
| his nature that it has become utterly unnatural. 

And yet while there is danger of reaching a point 
where the sinner will be too infirm of purpose to strive 
any longer for the good, there is still in all men a re- 


200 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 







mainder of freedom, and a possibility of change for th 
better. What the king in “ Hamlet” (4 : 7 : 117) say 
with regard to the evil deed is equally true with regar 
to the good deed: 
That we would do, 

We should do when we would ; for this ‘‘would’’ change: 

And hath abatements and delays as many 

As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents ; 

And then this ‘‘should’’ is like a spendthrift sigh, 

That hurts by easing. 


The player-king in the same drama (3 : 2: 171) declare’ 
that | 
Purpose is but the slave to memory ; 
Of violent birth, but poor validity. 


And Hamlet himself advises his mother (3 : 4 : 163): | 


Refrain to-night ; 
And that shall lend a kind of easiness 
To the next abstinence ; the next more easy ; 
For use can almost change the stamp of nature, 
And either master the devil, or throw him out 
With wondrous potency. 


Here there is recognized a “stamp of nature,” al 
evil taint of blood. No poet of the world has mor: 
fully and constantly acknowledged man’s congenital de 
pravity. Timon of Athens (4: 3:18) proclaims that | 






There’s nothing level in our cursed natures, 
But direct villainy. 


In “All's Well That Ends Well” (4 : 3 : 18) we read’ 
“Now, God delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves) 
what things are we! Merely our own traitors!” If 


“Measure for Measure” (1 : 2: 120): 





PERSONAL SINS AND HEREDITARY SINFULNESS 201 





| Our natures do pursue, 
 . Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, 
A thirsty evil ; and when we drink we die. 


‘In “Hamlet” (3:1:117): “Virtue cannot so inoculate 
‘our old stock but we shall relish of it.” In “Love's 
|Labor’s Lost” (1 : 1 : 149): 


For every man with his affects is born, 
Not by might mastered, but by special grace. 


Shakespeare testifies that all men are sinners: 


Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all, 


feys Henry VI. (Part IL, 3 : 3 : 31); 
Who lives that’s not depraved or depraves? 


Says Timon (1:2:124). In “Othello” we read (3: 
i; 137): 


Where's that palace whereinto foul things 
Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure, 
| ~-—s« But some uncleanly apprehensions 
Keep leets and law-days, and in sessions sit 
With meditations lawful? 


mmamlet confesses (3 : 1 : 122): 


_ lam myself indifferent honest ; but yet I could accuse me of 
‘such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I 
am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my 
‘beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give 
them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows 
as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant 
knaves, all; believe none of us. 


} 


202 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


And yet our poet will not clear man from responsi 
bility for his inborn depravity. Hamlet compare 
God’s influence to the sun which “breeds maggots in ; 
dead dog, kissing carrion” (2 : 2: 181); that is, God1 
no more responsible for the corruption in man’s hear 
and the evil that comes from it, than the sun is respon: 
sible for the maggots which its heat breeds in a dear 
dog. We are not only corrupt by nature but we ari 
guilty. In “The Winter’s Tale” (1 : 2 : 69), Polixene 
describes his companionship with Leontes, when the 
were boys together: 


We knew not the doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d 
That any did. Had we pursued that life, 

And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’ d 
With stronger blood, we should have answered 
Heaven boldly, Not guilty ; the imposition cleared 
Hereditary ours ; 


that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adan 
had not made us guilty. : 

Man’s guilt, both hereditary and personal, is real, an¢ 
it has punishment for its correlate. There is a craving 
to make reparation for sin. In “Measure for Measure’ 
(5 :1:470), when Escalus expresses sorrow that Angel« 
should have sinned, Angelo replies: 





I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, 

And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart 
That I crave death more willingly than mercy ; 
’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it. 


Posthumus in “Cymbeline” (5 : 4 : 22), thinking he hac 
caused the death of his wife, makes request of the gods 


CONSCIENCE PREDICTS RETRIBUTION 203 


For Imogen’s dear life take mine ; and though 

Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coined it. 

Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp ; 
Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake ; 
You rather mine, being yours ; and so, great Powers, 
If you will take this audit, take this life, 

And cancel these cold bonds ! 


Desired more than constrained ; to satisfy, 
If of my freedom’ tis the main part, take 
No stricter render of me than my all ; 


hat is, settle the account with me by taking my life. 

While the conscience of the penitent desires punish- 
nent. the conscience of the impenitent man expects 
uunishment. 


Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, 


ays Hamlet (3 : 1: 83); and the queen in the same 
lay (4: 5 : 17) breaks out in fear: 


To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, 

Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss ; 
So full of artless jealousy is guilt, 

It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. 


mee Henry VI. (Part Il., 3 : 2 : 232) exclaims: 
What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted ! 
| Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just ; 


And he but naked, though locked up in steel, 
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted. 


Sin may blunt the edge of conscience for a time: 


When we in our viciousness grow hard, 
(O misery on’t !) the wise gods seal our eyes ; 


204 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us 

Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut 

To our confusion. : 
(«Antony and Cleopatra,’’ 3 : 13 : III.) 


But conscience will sooner or later awake again in t. 
case of the guilty. Gonzalo, in “The Tempest” (3 : 
104), testifies : 
Their great guilt, 
Like poison given to work a great time after, 
Now ’ gins to bite the spirits. 


O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me! 


My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villain. 


| 
Even “Richard III.” confesses at the last (5 : 3: q 






And conscience is but the prophecy of another cc 
demnation more terrible still. “Can we outrun t 
heavens?” says “Henry VI.” (Part IL, 5 :2 : 73). A 
“Henry V.” (4: 1: 157) says nobly: “If transgresse 
have defeated the law and outrun native punishme) 
though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to | 
from God.” Hamlet witnesses (3 : 3 : 57): | 


In the corrupted currents of this world 

Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice ; 

But ’tis not so above. There is no shuffling ; 

There the action lies in his true nature, and we ourselves 
Compell’d, even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, 
To give in evidence. 


Hear King John (4 : 2 : 216): 








RETRIBUTION IN THIS WORLD ALSO 205 


Oh, when the last account’ twixt heaven and earth 
Is to be made, then shall this hand and seal 

[the warrant for the murder of Prince Arthur] 
Witness against us to damnation. 


/ 
a 
} 
} 
] 
4 
7 


And in the same play the Bastard speaks (4 : 3 : 117): 


Beyond the infinite and boundless reach 
Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, 
Art thou damn’d, Hubert! 


In all literature there is no scene more moving than 
that one in which Beaufort, the bloody cardinal in King 
Henry VI. (Part II., 3 : 3 : 2), offers the treasures of a 
realm to purchase a little longer life, cries out in agony 
at the thought of his victims, and when asked to indi- 
cate some remaining hope in God’s mercy, sinks back in 
death, but makes no sign. 

ime there is retribution in the world to come, but there 
is also retribution here. This world is under the rule 
of Providence (“ Hamlet,” 5 : 2 :.10): 


There’s a divinity that shapes our ends 
Rough-hew them how we will. 


Says Edgar, in “King Lear” (5 : 3; 171): 


The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
Make instruments to plague us. 


and Hamlet (1 : 2 : 257): 


Foul deeds will rise, 
Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, 
To men’s eyes. 


206 “THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 
Macbeth testifies (1 : 7 : 10) that 


Even-handed justice 
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice 
To our own lips ; 





and Buckingham, in “Richard III.” (5 : 2 : 23): 


Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men 
To turn their own points in their master’s bosoms. 
| 


From this retributive Providence here, as well as fror. 
God’s judgments hereafter, there is no escape excep 
through repentance and faith in the atonement whic! 
God himself has provided. | 

But let us particularly notice that repentance is no 
mere outward penance, nor any merely transient sorrow 
Shakespeare understands that no true penitence exist. 
where the sinner still clings to his sin, or fails to repai 
the wrong. The king in “ Hamlet” cries (si aos 51) 


What form of prayer 
Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder? | 
That cannot be ; since I am still possess’ d 
Of those effects for which I did the murder, 
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. 
May one be pardon’d and retain the offence ?’’ 





What then ? what rests ? 
Try what repentance can : what can it not ? 
Yet what can it, when one cannot repent ? 
O wretched state! O bosom, black as death ! 
O liméd soul, that, struggling to be free, | 
Art more engag’d ! 





In “Measure for Measure” (2 : 3: 30) the duke ad. 
dresses Juliet: 





REPENTANCE IS NOT ATONEMENT | 207 





i Tis meet so, daughter ; but lest you do repent 

As that the sin hath brought you to this shame, 
Which sorrow is always toward ourselves, not heaven, 
Showing we would not spare heaven as we love it, 

| But as we stand in fear. 


} 


And Juliet responds: 


I do repent me, as it is an evil, 
And take the shame with joy. 


meriel, in “The Tempest” (3 : 3: 72) interprets both 
‘nature and the human heart when he says: 


| 
For which foul deed, 


The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have 
Incensed the seas and shores ; yea, all the creatures 
Against your peace ; . . whose wrath to guard you from, 
. . is nothing but heart's sorrow, 
And a clear life ensuing. 


Henry V. (4 : 1 : 287) expresses the deepest feeling 
of the truly penitent man, when he adds to his repa- 
tation and his sorrow the confession that both these are 
insufficient : : 

More will I do, 
Though all that I can do is nothing worth ; 
Since that my penitence comes after all, 
Imploring pardon— 


pardon both for the crime itself, and for the imperfection 
‘of his repenting of it. Repentance does not of itself 
‘pay man’s debt to the divine justice, or clear the guilty 
from the punishment of their sin. Prayer may to some 
extent avail. In “All’s Well That Ends Well” (3:4: 
25) the aged countess speaks: 


{ 


208 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


What angel shall 
Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive, 
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear 
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath 
Of greatest justice ! 


But the only real quittance is afforded by the work of 
Christ in our behalf. Here the testimony of Shakes: 
peare to the need of human nature and the sufficiency 
of the divine provision is ample and complete. In 
« All’s Well That Ends Well,’ Helena declares (2 : 1) 


149): 





It is not so with Him that all things knows 

As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows ; 
But most it is presumption in us when 

The help of heaven we count the act of men. 


We read in “King Henry VI.” (Part IL, 3: 2: 154) 


That dread King took our state upon him 
To free us from his Father’s wrathful curse. 


In Measure: for NMessare seq: emi 7 4) 


Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once ; 
And He that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy. 


Ele speaks in’ Richardsliy (29 eiee85 0) 700 
The world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son ; 
and in “' King Henry 1V..7(Partil, 1): 1)2124)10f 


Those holy fields 
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet 


SHAKESPEARE’S WITNESS TO CHRISTIANITY 209 


Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed 
For our advantage on the bitter cross. 





fn “King Henry VI.” (Part IL, 1: 1: 110) Salisbury 
swears 
| Now by the death of Him that died for all ; 


ind in “King Richard III.” Clarence in the Tower ad- 
ures his murderers (1 : 4 : 183): 


| I charge you, as you hope to have redemption 
Y By Christ's dear blood, shed for our grievous sins, 
That you depart, and lay no hands on me. 


| 
It may possibly be thought that in the plays of 
Shakespeare we have no real clew to the religious beliefs 
of the poet, since he puts into the mouth of each char- 
icter only what fitted his station and his time. This 
night be true, if there were intermingled with the tes- 
imonies to the great facts of ethics and religion other 
estimonies to atheism and immorality. But these latter 
re conspicuously lacking. It is otherwise with Mar- 
owe ; he was known as an atheist, and his characters 
hess both for and against morality and the Christian 
ith. 

Suppose for a moment that a census were taken of 
zeorge Eliot’s characters; that their expressions of be- 
lef or unbelief were classified, as I have attempted to 
‘lassify Shakespeare’s; can any one doubt that the re- 
ult would be a far different one, and that George Eliot’s 
fwn skepticism and pessimism would be discovered 
faintly written, as in a palimpsest, underneath their 
mes? I challenge any man to find unbelief in the 


ramatis persone of Shakespeare’s plays, except in cases 
| Outs. 


| 


210 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


where it is the manifest effect or excuse of sin, reprove 
by the context or changed to fearful acknowledgmei 
of the truth by the results of transgression. In h 
ethical judgments he never makes a slip; he is as sur 
footed as a Swiss mountaineer ; he depicts vice, but I 
does not make it alluring or successful. 

After earnest searching I can unhesitatingly avow tl 
belief that the great dramatist was both pure in h 
moral teaching and singularly sound in faith. There 
a freedom of utterance with regard to the relations) 
the sexes, such as is natural in a bold and vigorous ag 
but there is no lingering over sensual details. Plaus 
ble sinners like Falstaff come to an evil end. Ho 
pathetic is the Hostess’ account of his death in “ Kir 
Flenry Vn (2m Biel) : 





His nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbled of green fielé 
‘‘How now, Sir John,’’ quoth I: ‘‘what man! be of a 
cheer.’’ So ’a cried out, ‘‘God, God, God!’ three or fe 
times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him’a should not think: 
God ; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any su) 
thoughts yet. So’a bade me lay more clothes on his feet ; If 
my hand into the bed, and felt them, and they were as cold 
any stone ; then I felt to his knees and so upward, and upwat 
and all was as cold as any stone. | 





The recent suggestion that Sir John’s “babbling 
green fields”’ is an allusion to the Twenty-third Psalt 
and that Shakespeare here means to intimate that 
his death he returned to the faith of his childhood a 
felt that the Lord was “making him to lie down 
green pastures,” had not yet occurred to the Hostes 
for she was only bent on soothing a troubled conscien 
by turning away its thoughts from God. 


CREATOR OF IMAGERY AS WELL AS OF CHARACTER 211 


‘ 


There is no trace of Mariolatry, nor of dependence 
for salvation upon ritual and ceremony. Yet Shakes- 
“peare is as devoid of Puritanism as he is of Romish 
superstition. In an age of much clerical corruption he 
‘never rails at the clergy. While he has some most un- 
godly prelates, his priests are all a credit to their calling. 
‘None of his characters are disseminators of skepticism. 
‘IT cannot explain all this except by supposing that 
Shakespeare was himself a_ believer. Though he was 
‘not a theological dogmatist, nor an ecclesiastical parti- 
san, he was unwaveringly assured of the fundamental 
erities of the Christian scheme. Shakespeare had dug 
‘down through superficial formulas to the bed-rock of 
‘Christian doctrine. He held the truths which belong 
in common to all ages of the church. If any deny the 
personality of God or the deity of Christ, they have a 
‘controversy with Shakespeare. If any think it irrational 
to believe in man’s depravity, guilt, and need of super- 
‘Natural redemption, they must also be prepared to say 
‘that Shakespeare did not understand human nature. 
Here is a healthy secular mind, calmly and sagaciously 
judging things high and things low, and so picturing life 
in its essential features that we appeal to his characters 
as if they were living men. He had his trials with the 
sex, but there is no more bitterness against women than 
prejudice against priests. The king and the beggar he 
‘conceives with equal truth to nature. The archness and 
persuasiveness of a French woman were never depicted 
so well as in Katherine’s reception of King Henry’s 
suit. The pedantic theorizing and dogged courage of a 
Welsh soldier were never better exhibited than in Flu- 
ellen. Yet Shakespeare never traveled. He was not a 





212 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


man of the court. He was primarily a man of business, 
But the man of business was a genius—the finest genius 
in the way of poetic te that ever appeared 
upon this planet. 

Goethe carried erudition into art. Shakespeare was 
never a man of technical learning—the scholastic ele 
ment is absent from his plays. He makes up for all de 
ficiencies by his creative faculty. What others acquire 
by rote, he gets by insight. And so “he could take m 
everything,” as Taine has said ; “ sanguinary ferocity anc 
refined generosity, trivial buffoonery and the divine in 


nocence of love.” “It was a piece of good fortune that 
he knew little Latin and less Greek,” says Lilly; “for 
this closed to him the réle of imitation. The rules of 
classicalism he knows not of, nor is his mental noriadl 
bounded by the writers of antiquity. Of intellectua’ 
freedom he is our supreme example, and for two centu 
ries well-nigh the last example, among English poets.” 
I have said so much of the universal element m 
Shakespeare’s creation of character, that I have but 
scant time to deal with the poet’s creation of imagery 01 
of diction. As to imagery, I run no risk in saying that 
our poet saw nothing in an isolated way. To him there 
was a universe: all things were interdependent ; truth 
in one realm had its analogues in every other. It was 
not the mere association of ideas which we call fancy 


it was the discernment of rational connections which we 








call imagination. © 

Our Lord Jesus Christ was the most imaginative, anc 
at the same time the most profound, of thinkers: bread, 
water, light, darkness, the sea, the sky, the birds, the 
beasts, the fish of the sea, all taught spiritual lessons. 





ny aa 
eee eee 


IMAGERY AND DICTION 213 


Shakespeare possessed this divine gift of imagination in 
his lower degree and within his more limited range. 


| The flow of metaphor is so constant and so natural that 


we cannot call it brilliancy—it is insight into the heart 


of things. Like Tennyson’s wizard, 





| 
To him the wall 
That sunders ghosts and shadow-casting men 
Became as crystal, and he saw them through it, 
And heard their voices talk behind the wall, 
| And learnt their elemental secrets, powers, 
And forces. 


Other poets strain after effects; with Shakespeare all 
is spontaneous. With others there are lapses, and the 
“poetry becomes prose; with Shakespeare the vision and 
the faculty divine seem native to him and perpetual. 
-Milton’s epitaph on Shakespeare is only truthful when 
‘it says: 

To the shame of slow-endeavoring art 

Thy easy numbers flow. 

We are amazed, tantalized, carried away, with the rush, 
the beauty, the inexhaustible vitality of his imagination. 
And yet, nothing is overdone—in the very torrent, tem- 
pest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of his passion, there 
bE a temperance that gives it hold upon our judgment. 
When Hotspur asks (“King Henry IV.,” Part I., 4: 


(1:94): 


Where is his son, 
The nimble-footed, mad-cap Prince of Wales, 
And his comrades, that daffed the world aside 
| And bid it pass? 


214 THE UNIVERSALITY. OF SHAKESPEARE 
Sir Richard Vernon answers: 


All furnish’ d, all in arms, 
All plumed like estridges, that with the wind 
Bated—like eagles newly bath’d ; 
Glittering in golden coats like images ; 
As full of spirit as the month of May, 
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer ; 
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls. 
I saw young Harry—with his beaver on, 
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed— 
Rise from the ground like feather’d Mercury, 
And vaulted with such ease into his seat, 
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds 
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, 
And witch the world with noble horsemanship. 





Here are nine different similes, succeeding each other 
with such matchless freshness and beauty that they fairly 
— dazzle us, yet each adding a quick new stroke of stirring 
description, and all together rising to a climax that cal 
tivates both sense and reason. 

In character and in imagery we have seen the uni 
versality of Shakespeare—his appeal to the universal, 
elements of human nature. It remains to speak of the 
poet’s diction—the word-garb in which his creations 
are portrayed. Here we find him the greatest aug: 
menter of our language. Milton, with all his adapta 
tions from the Greek and the Latin, uses but eight thou- 
sand words, Shakespeare cannot content himself with 
less than fifteen thousand. Hundreds of these are of 
his own coinage, or are preserved to our literature only 
by his use of them. Felictter audax is the phrase that 
best designates him. He had the subtle sense of the 
connection between word and thing which led the 














{ 
4 THE POETIC DICTION OF SHAKESPEARE 25 


Greeks to apply the same name rviema to both. It is 
said of Ruskin that in his childhood the sight of the 
word crocodile would frighten him. Every great poet 
has this keen appreciation of the capacity of language. 
Shakespeare, beyond all others, had the gift of naming 
things which the author of the book of Genesis as- 
cribes to the unfallen father of the race. Of all poets, 
he is most easily master of the art: vem acu tangere. 
His words are “the true and only words.” To change 
the words is to spoil the thought. 

Not only the single word but the various combina- 
tions of the word into phrase and line were as much 
creations as were his characters and his images. There 
is an immortal music in his verse. Pathetic or gay, 
gentle or grand, as the case may be, it goes so to the 
heart and it so lingers in the ear, that a sense of divine 
perfection is roused within us, and we get a new proof 
of a supernatural intelligence that has made the rhythm 
of thought and the rhythm of speech to complement 
each other and to constitute one whole. 

If weask for pathos, where can we find it if not in the 
dirge which the princes sing over the seemingly lifeless 
\@ymbeline (4 : 2: 260): 
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, 
Nor the furious winter's rages ; 
Thou thy worldly task hast done, 
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages ; 


| Golden lads and girls all must, 
| As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 


Fear no more the frowns o’ the great, 
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke ; 
Care no more to clothe and eat ; 
To thee the reed is as the oak: 


216 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


The sceptre, learning, physic, must 
All follow this, and come to dust. 


Fear no more the lightning-flash, 
Nor th’ all-dreaded thunder-stone ; 
Fear not slander, censure rash ; 
Thou hast finished joy and moan : 
All lovers young, all lovers must, 
Consign to thee, and come to dust. 


If we desire solemn utterance, what can surpass Alonzo’ 
confession of his crime in “The Tempest” (3 : 3 : 96) 


al ee | 
O, it is monstrous, monstrous ! 


Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; 
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, 
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc d 
The name of Prosper; it did base my trespass ! 


Or if we wish for ethereal delicacy, we shall discover 1 
nowhere if not in Ariel’s song (“ Tempest,” I : 2 : 395) 


Full fathom five thy father lies ; 
Of his bones are coral made; 

Those are pearls that were his eyes ; 
Nothing of him that doth fade, 

But doth suffer a sea-change 

Into something rich and strange. 

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell : 

Hark ! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell. 





It took two hundred years to convince the English 
people that Shakespeare was their greatest poet, but m 
writer of eminence in recent times has had inclination t 
dispute it. We are in a fair way indeed to crown hin 
as the poet laureate of the race. But with all our ap 
preciation let us be both critical and just. His great 






a THE LIMITATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE 217 
‘ness does not consist in his power of invention. Of all 
his plays there are only two the germs of which cannot 
be found before his time; but those two are “ Midsum- 
! mer-Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest,” in which 
‘pure imagination has reached its very loftiest flights. 
uite commonly, however, he took his whole story from 
“others. He was not an inventor of incident, but a 
Sreator of character. 
| The disjecta membra of many a dead drama lay scat- 
‘tered at his feet. Like the bones of Ezekiel’s vision, 
‘they were very old and exceeding dry. Shakespeare 
prophesied over them and a spirit came into them; a 
veritable heart began to throb under the ribs of death; 
‘the szmulacra of humanity breathed and moved and 
spoke; the dry bones became living men. And with 
this creation of real characters, true to nature, instinct 
‘with vitality, and perfectly separable from one another, 
all the complex web of incident in which they moved 
became living also. The story when Shakespeare took 
it was dull and colorless; the poet touched it with the 
torch of his genius, and it began to glow and corus- 
cate like a piece of fireworks after it is lit. 
Shakespeare is the creator of character, but of char- 
acter belonging to this world rather than the next. He 
is the poet of secular humanity. Homer has pictured 
| a few types of humanity in a naive and objective way. 
Shakespeare shows us human nature in its infinite vari- 
ety; there are more than six hundred distinct charac- 
ters in his mimic world, yet every one of them gives us 

intimation of another world of varied passions and fears 

within the circle of his breast. Virgil is the poet of a 
political epoch, the representative of Roman hope and 


_ 


ero THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 
















civilization, the sweet singer of the Augustan age) 
Shakespeare transcends all epochs and all times ; he car’ 
enter into the spirit of Greece and of Rome as easily 
as into that of his native England; and that because he 
knows what human nature is, everywhere and always. 

Dante is the religious poet of the Roman and mediz) 
val church, as Milton is the religious poet of Protestant | 
ism and the Reformation. Both Dante and Milton re 
gard man chiefly in his relations to an invisible anc 
spiritual world, and earthly life is merely incidental te 
the heavenly. But to Shakespeare the present world ig 
man’s arena, and the future looms up only now and ther 
as a dim and shadowy background. 

Wordsworth is the poet of nature. The divine life 
interfused through all physical things is the central) 
thought of his verse. Shakespeare does not go beneath! 
the surface of nature, and he regards the outward world 
mainly in its relations to man, hardly ever as the mani 
festation of God. Browning is the poet of the inner} 
life, the dramatist of motives, the portrayer of specula/! 
tive struggles and triumphs. Shakespeare is no philos- 
opher ; he deals with motives only as they work them-| 
selves out in action; he is the poet of the concrete, 
rather than of the abstract. But within this realm of 
secular life and character in action, he is supreme. More 
than any other poet he has added to our knowledge of 
ourselves as creatures of this present world. | 

A greater poetry than his is indeed conceivable and} 
possible, for nature and God are indispensable factors in/ 
the imaginative interpretation of the universe, and these! 
play no great part in Shakespeare’s verse. But human) 
nature reflects the divine nature, and in studying hu-| 


THE GREATEST. POET OF SECULAR HUMANITY 219 


manity we gain material for the study of God. What 
our great poet has told us about humanity is of inesti- 
mable value to theological thought. 

i I have not intended to compare the poetry of Shakes- 
peare with the poetry of the Bible. Shakespeare has 
neither the eloquence of Isaiah nor the sublimity of 
Job. What Shakespeare does not profess to do, Job 
and Isaiah do profess to do—namely, to teach of God 
and duty. Nor have I intended to compare the merits 
of the great uninspired poets, or to call one greater and 
another less. It is better to call each great in his pecu- 
liar sphere. But in the creation of character Shakes- 
peare so far surpasses all others, that by common con- 
sent we have come to regard him as the greatest secu- 
lar poet of the world. Will the world ever see a poet 
who shall surpass him? It can only be by adding 
Dante’s vision of God and Wordsworth’s vision of 
nature to Shakespeare’s vision of humanity. Until 
some inspired bard shall touch all these several strings 
with simultaneous and equal mastery, we may well con- 
tent ourselves with Shakespeare. 

We can subscribe to the judgment of James Russell 
Lowell when he says that ‘“‘ For those who know no lan- 
guage but their own there is as much intellectual train- 
ing to be got from the study of his writings as from 
those of any, I had almost said, of all, of the great writ- 
ers of antiquity.” And thechief reason for this is that 
beyond all other poets Shakespeare has a faculty for the 
universal, a power of seizing upon the types of things, 
and an art of evoking living characters in which these 
types are concretely represented. | 
_ Dewey, in his “ Psychology’ (200), comes very near 


{ 


220 THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE 


to expressing the noblest lesson of our theme, when h) 
says : “ All products of the creative imagination are ur 
conscious testimonies to the unity of spirit which bind 
man to man, and man to nature, in one organic whole, 
We would add only the one remark and explanatior 
that the spirit which thus binds all things together, an 
makes possible the poet’s insight into universal trut) 
and beauty, is none other than the omnipresent Spiri 
of God, whose specifically religious work is inspiratior 
but who is also working in all secular literature, and 1 
making it the progressive revelation of his own a | 
life. 





a 
= 
= 
a 








MILTON 


THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


In the French Academy, that national Sanhedrin of 
savants and /ittérateurs, the custom is for each newly 
elected member to signalize his admission into the com- 
pany of the immortals by delivering a eulogy upon the 
academician who has last died and whose place he has 
been chosen to fill. It is a curious fact that the first 
‘published poem of John Milton should have been his 
“Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick Poet, W. 
Shakespeare.” The six-year-old boy with auburn curls, 
who played before the door of his father’s shop at the 
‘sign of the spread eagle in Bread Street, may possibly 
have attracted the attention of William Shakespeare, 
when he made his last visit to London town in 1614, 
and with Ben Jonson and other jovial spirits passed by 
the scrivener’s door on their way to the Mermaid Inn. 

We know at any rate that, whether in the theatre or 
through the printed page, Milton very early heard 


Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, 
Warble his native wood-notes wild. 


He took the torch as it were, from Shakespeare’s hand, 
and passed it on to after times. It is no wonder that 
one of the first uses to which Milton puts the torch is 
to light up the portrait,of his great predecessor. He 
223 


224 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


tells us that Shakespeare requires no monument of piled | 


stones : 
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, 
What needst thou such weak witness of thy name? 


The rapt and mute astonishment of mankind is itself a | 
sort of stony monument to enshrine him: i | 





Dost make us marble with too much conceiving ; 
And, so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie, 


| 
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, 
| 
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die. 


In this epitaph to the greatest of poets, whose sun 
had so lately set, we perceive already the signs that | 
another sun had risen in the literary firmament. The 
new light was no mere reproduction of the old—it Had | 
a quality of its own. The world has agreed to call it | 
«‘Miltonic,” in token of its unique force and greatness. | 
J shall make it my first business to define this epithet, | 
and to show the new and peculiar sources of Milton’s; 
power. The one word which springs into mind, as we 
give account to ourselves of the impression he makes. 
upon us, is the word “sublime.” But the sublimity of. 
Milton is a sublimity of his own. You cannot explain | 
it as a composite of elements found separately in any 
past writings, whether secular or sacred. It is some: | 
thing larger and more complete than the broken and, 
jagged grandeur of Aéschylus. Milton’s sublimity is a 
new majesty combined with a new harmony. In it you, 
may discern a boom of lofty independence, of supet-) 
sensual ideality, of free commerce with the invisible 
world, ‘There is a “linked sweetness long drawn out, — 
but there is also the os magna _soniturum, the sustained 











| 


| 
| THE MILTONIC SUBLIMITY 225 
| 
i 


utterance of one who seems to be prophet as well as 
“poet, and to repeat in our ears with not unaccustomed 
lips the whispers of the Infinite. 

__ Whether we can put into words the whole meaning 

| of the word “ Miltonic”” may be doubtful. There can 

_be no doubt, however, that the gift of sublime thought 
and expression was in this case inborn. The first pro- 
ductions of the poet reveal its existence not so fully, 
but just as truly, as the last.. When he was twenty-six 
years of age he could describe in “ Arcades” such 
meditations as these: 


In deep of night, when drowsiness 
Hath lock’d up mortal sense, then listen I 
To the celestial Syrens’ harmony, 
That sit upon the nine infolded spheres, 
And sing to those that hold the vital shears 
And turn the adamantine spindle round 
On which the fates of gods and men are wound. 


And he was but twenty-one when he wrote his ode, “ At 
aSolemn Musick,” in which, not after the fashion of 
the classic Muse, but rather in language drawn from the 
treasuries of Holy Writ and in the spirit of Isaiah or of 
John, he presents “to our high-rais’d phantasy” 


That undisturbed song of pure consent, 

Aye sung before the sapphire-colour’d throne 
To him who sits thereon, 
With saintly shout and solemn jubilee 
Where the bright Seraphim, in burning row, 
Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow ; 
And the cherubic host, in thousand quires, 
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, 


With those just spirits that wear victorious palms, 
ty 


226 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


Hymns devout and holy psalms 
Singing everlastingly. 


There are certain constituents of the Miltonic poetry 
somewhat less obvious, and which go far to explain its 
power to move and awe. One of these is its intense _ 
personality. The subjective element is felt everywhere; | 
the poem and the man are inseparable; the poet puts | 
his own life and history into his verse. The contrast 
between Shakespeare and Dante in this matter is par- | 
ticularly instructive. Shakespearean poetry is objective | 
—the author is lost in his work. It requires much sub- | 
tlety and insight to gather anything with regard to the | 
poet’s idiosyncrasies from the plays or the poems; and, | 
when we have drawn our inferences, we have to acknowl- 
edge that they are unpleasantly precarious. ‘The poetry 
of Dante, on the contrary, is full of the poet himself ; “ The 
Divine Comedy” is the drama of his life; hell, purgatory, 
and heaven itself, are but the three-fold stage upon which | 
the exiled patriot acts out his thoughts and sorrows. | 
In a similar manner John Milton’s personality shines ; 
through all his works. Out of his prose and poetry we } 
can reconstruct the whole fabric of his life, as perfectly | 
as if his main purpose had been to write for us an auto- | 
biography. | 

Yet another note of the Miltonic poetry is its austere) 
purity. The personality is a pure personality, and there- 
fore the poet may, nay, he must, put it into his verse. 
Through all his writing there runs a strain of noble | 
pride and _ self-assertion. Not for nothing had God 
made him what he was. He knew that he had received 
the full quota of ten talents. He would not waste his 



















ITS AUSTERE PURITY 227 


gifts in riot or self-indulgence, but would husband them, 
and increase them, by protracted studies and the open- 
ing of his heart to influences from above. « He who 


| would not be frustrate of his hope to write well,” he 


himself says, “ought himself to be a true poem.” John 


_ Milton’s life and work are a great object-lesson to the 


whole school of thinkers who maintain that the true 
artist must be a colorless mirror to reflect whatever 
Images the pure or impure world may print upon its 
surface—an object-lesson equally to that other school 
that regards the sowing of wild oats in youth merely as 
the gaining of a valuable experience, 

Our poet never forgot that he was a man, and a serv- 
ant of the high and holy One. Of his travels in Italy 


he asseverates: “I again take God to witness that, in 


all those places where so many things are considered 


lawful, I lived sound and untouched by all profligacy 
and vice, having this thought perpetually with me, that, 
though I might escape the eyes of men, I certainly 


‘could not the eyes of God.” And so through all his 
‘days there was not one line written which, so far as its 
‘Moral tone was concerned, he or any other pure soul 
would have wished afterward to blot. The closing words 
of “Comus” are the consistent testimony both of his 
poetry and of his life: 
| Mortals that would follow me, 
Love Virtue ; she alone is free : 
She can teach ye how to climb 

Higher than the sphery chime ; 


Or, if Virtue feeble were, 
Heaven itself would stoop to her, 


! 


There is a third characteristic of Milton as a poet— 


I mean his immense erudition. His verse not seldom 
requires learning to interpret it. The whole mythologi- 

cal world of Greece and Rome was native to him, and 
he was deeply read in sacred Scripture. The words of 
John the Baptist in “ Paradise Regained”? might have 


been Milton’s own: 


When I was but a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do | 
What might be public good : myself I thought 
Born to that end, born to promote all truth 
And righteous things. 


228 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 
| 
| 
| 


We are told that his father caused him to be “ in- 
structed daily . . . by sundry masters and teachers both 
at home and in the public schools.” He had a passion | 
for study, and from his twelfth year he scarcely ever 
until midnight went from books to bed—it was this un- 
seasonable diligence indeed that laid the foundation for 
disease of the eyes and subsequent total blindness. He 
became the most distinguished Latinist at his univer-' 


sity. Listen to his “« Master’s Oration on the Advan-/ 


tages of Knowledge” : | 


No more in the orator than in the poet [he says] can any-) 
thing common or mediocre be tolerated. . . It behooves him who. 
would truly be and be considered an orator, to be instructed and’ 
thoroughly finished in a certain circular education in all the arts | 
and all science. . . I would rather be working with severe study 
for that true reputation, by the preliminary practice of the neces-| 
sary means, than hurrying on a false reputation by a forced and: 
precocious style. 

He finds nothing more nourishing to his genius than 
a learned and liberal leisure, and thus he praises it : | 





ITS RELIGIOUS FAITH 229 


| This I would fain believe to be the divine sleep of Hesiod ; 
‘this to be Endymion’s nightly meetings with the moon; this to 
be the retirement of Prometheus, under the guidance of Mer- 
-cury, to the steepest solitudes of Mount Caucasus, where he be- 
‘came the wisest of gods and men, so that even Jupiter himself is 
‘said to have gone to consult him about the marriage of Thetis. 
I call to witness for myself the groves and rivers and the beloved 
village elms, under which I remember so pleasantly having had 
supreme delight with the Muses, where I too among rural scenes 





and remote forests seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated 
through a hidden eternity. 


The poet had his wish. His well-to-do and liberal 
father did not force him either into the law or into the 
church, but permitted him to spend the six years suc- 
ceeding his graduation in storing his mind with various 
learning, though he was yet ignorant what his future 
work would be. It was a hazardous experiment. All 
depended upon the quality of the stock and his capa- 
city for self-culture. Fortunately, these were of the 
imest. 

Religious faith constituted a fourth element, more 
important and dominant than all the rest. John Milton 
was a profound believer. He believed in a personal God 
and in man’s personal responsibility to him. In the 
Latin college oration, which I have already quoted in 
translation, there occurs also this sentence : 


This I consider, my hearers, as known and received by all, that 
‘the great Maker of the universe, when he had framed all else 
fleeting and subject to decay, did mingle with man, in addition 
to that of him which is mortal, a certain divine breath and, as it 
| were, part of himself, immortal, indestructible, free from death 
and all hurt; which, after it had sojourned purely and holily for 
some time in the earth as a heavenly visitant, should flutter up- 
ward to its native heaven and return to its proper place and 


| 


230 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 






country ; accordingly, that nothing can deservedly be taken into 
account among the causes of our happiness, unless it somehow or 
other regards not only this secular life, but also that life everlast- 


ing. 

On arriving at the age of twenty-three he mourns the | 
fact that, while the days are hasting by, his late spring | 
shows as yet no bud or blossom of completed work, and _ 
even inward ripeness does not yet appear : 





Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 
It shall be still in strictest measure even | 
To that same lot, however mean or high, : 
Toward which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven; | 

All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye. 


Here is a great mind and a great heart not ignorant | 
of its own powers, yet humbly waiting its appointed _ 
task. To his friend, Charles Diodati, he writes in 1637: 


What God has resolved concerning me I know not, but this at | 
least I know: he has instilled into me a vehement love of the | 
beautiful. Not with so much labor is Ceres said to have sought | 
her daughter Proserpine, as Iam wont day and night to seek for | 
this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, | 
for many are the shapes of things divine. . . But what am I doing? 
I am pluming my wings and meditating flight; but as yet our : 





Pegasus raises himself on very tender pinions. Let us be lowly 
wise. ‘ 


y 


It is evident that Milton, at the age of thirty-four, | 
has both the literary training and the devout spirit | 
which fit him to be a great religious poet. But he has: 
not yet received his message. Form is assured, but 
substance is yet to come. As respects form, he is the 
product of the generation past—the spontaneity and | 





PREPARATION OF PRACTICAL LIFE 231 


splendor of the Renaissance survive in him. As re- 
spects substance, he is to be the product of the new 
generation, with its profound convictions, its hatred of 
ancient error, its fierce struggles for the truth—the 
English Reformation finds in him its poetical embodi- 
ment and expression. Milton was a Puritan of the 
Puritans ; and, as Puritanism has been said to be only 
Protestantism in its acute form, we can best express the 
significance of his work by saying that, as Dante was 
the poet of the Roman Catholic Church, so John Mil- 
ton was the poet of the Protestant Reformation. 

How shall the young student, whose lofty and fin- 
ished verse might as yet be counted only the achieve- 
ment of a better Spenser, be endowed with the stern 
magnificence of “Paradise Lost” and “ Paradise Re- 
gained”? Only by exchanging the ideal for the real 
world, only by undergoing the discipline of sorrow, by 
mingling with men, by absorbing himself for years in a 
great cause. The Miltonic sublimity, like the Dantean 
‘sublimity, was developed through experiences of exalted 
hope and agonizing fear. Not only the spirit of the 
prophet, but also the spirit of the martyr, must enter 
into it. The poet must come into contact with the 
greatest soldiers and statesmen of his time—heroes of 
faith, yet men of action, born to command, yet ready 
ito die for the truth. He never can paint the conflict 
between God and Satan in the invisible world, until he 
has taken part in the actual conflict between God and 
Satan in the world of the visible and present. And 
this plunging into the thick of the battle, this actual 
participation in the most momentous affairs, was Mil- 
ton’s lot during the twenty years from 1640 to 1660— 


| 


232 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


| 
the years that saw the rise and the success of the great | 
Rebellion, the trial and execution of King Charles the. 
First, the splendid reign of the great Protector, the 
rallying of the Royalists after Cromwell's death, and | 
the cruelty and shame of the Restoration. 

In my last and only conversation with George Wil. | | 
liam Curtis, toward the close of his honored life, I told 
him that I had used his writings to illustrate the possi- | 
bility of two styles but of one Isaiah. At first sight, IT. 
ventured to say, it might seem hardly possible that the 
melliflyous grace of “The Potiphar Papers” and the | 
«Nile Notes of a Howadji,” written in Mr. Curtis’ i 
youth, could have had for their author the same person | 
who, in later years, wrote the calm and statesmanlike | 
articles in “ Harper's Weekly” ; if in thirty years Mr | 
Curtis’ style could so change, then during the forty | 
years of Isaiah’s ministry under the four kings of Judah | | 
his style may have changed also, and there may be no | 
necessity for believing in two Isaiahs. Mr. Curtis was) 
interested in the parallel I sought to draw, and he re-' 
plied vivaciously : “But do you know what it was that 
changed my style? It was the Civil War. That roused 
me to see that I had no right to spend my life in lite 
ary leisure. I felt that I must throw myself into the: 
struggle for freedom and for the Union. I began to! 
lecture, and to write, fora purpose. The style took care’ | 
of itself. But I fancy it is somewhat more solid now 
than it was thirty years ago.” | 

So it was with John Milton. His country called for 
his service. He became the literary chief of the Par- 
liamentary party, as Cromwell became its political chief. ' 
His services as Latin Secretary to the Council, and the 











| 

| : 

| MILTON'S PARENTAGE AND TRAINING 233 
| noble State papers that he wrote, were only the natural 
sequence of those tremendous pamphlets which he had 
previously hurled against the enemies of the Reforma- 
tion in England. And no account of his poetry can be 
| adequate which fails to notice the influence upon it of 
his prose, and of the great part he took in that life and 
death struggle of English liberty. 

By birth and education Milton was a Puritan. His 

father had been disinherited by his Roman Catholic 
grandfather for becoming a Protestant and for having in 
his possession an English Bible. His father’s house 
was a home of grave Puritanic piety, of religious read- 
‘ing, and of devout exercises. His mother, a woman 
given to charity and to prayer, had destined him for the 
church. At ten years he was put under the charge of a 
Puritan schoolmaster in Essex, who cut his hair short 
and turned him into a sweet little Roundhead. But his 
father had been a student in Christ’s Church at Oxford, 
and was a lover and composer of music. Young Mil- 
_ton’s training was of the broadest sort ; he became an 
excellent swordsman as well as an excellent player upon 
‘the organ. He was under the middle height, and was 
so distinguished for his personal beauty as well as for 
his withdrawal from common sports, that his contempo- 
‘Yaries at Cambridge called him “the Lady of Christ’s 
| College.” Milton replied, in a comic oration, that he 
wished those who thus named him could as easily put 
off the ass as he could put off the woman. 

In spite of his delicacy, no one ever seems to have 
questioned either his manliness or his courage. He 
would have taken orders if he could have done so with 
good conscience. But it was the time when Laud was 


234 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


trying to bring back all manner of papal ritual and cere. } 


mony into the church. This was Laud’s idea of “the 


beauty of holiness.” Nonconformists were harried out 
of the Establishment. Milton could be neither a hypo- | 
crite nor a slave. To the church, as governed by Laud, : 
he could not belong. He determined to devote himself 


to literature, not in a secular but in a religious spirit. 
As if speaking of his own gifts, he writes : 


These abilities are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but | 
yet to some in every nation, and are a power, beside the office of | 
a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of | 
virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, 
and to set the affections in right tune to celebrate in glorious and | 


lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God’s Almightiness. 


These words were written while he was meditating 


the plan of “Paradise Lost.” But twenty years were | 


to elapse before he could take up that work effectively. 
While he was in Italy, the conflict broke out between 


the Parliament and King Charles. ‘When I was desir | 
ous to cross to Sicily and Greece,” he writes, “the sad | 


news of civil war coming from England called me back; 


for I considered it disgraceful that, while my fellow- 
countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should - 


be traveling abroad at ease for intellectual purposes.” 
Returning to England, he found the battle joined. 


ee ee ee 


— ee 


+ --§ — -— - ———— ~ 








= 





Charles I., after trying in vain to govern without a Par- | 
liament, had summoned a Parliament that counted it a. 


first duty to call him to account. A deep religious fer- 


vor moved the nation to assert its right to freedom in 
Church and State. Over against the policy of “Thor | 


ough,’ which meant nothing more nor less than the 





| 
| 

| 
| MILTON'S PAMPHLETS 235 
breaking down of all constitutional checks upon royal 
i outsm and tyranny, the Parliament party asserted 
the doctrine of ‘Root and Branch,” and this meant the 
abolition of Episcopacy and the wresting from the king 
of all control over both revenue and army. 

Milton took part in the struggle, but not as a soldier. 


He says: 


I did not for any other reason decline the dangers of war, than 
‘that I might in another way, with much more efficacy, and with 
not less danger to myself, render assistance to my countrymen, 
and discover a mind neither shrinking from adverse fortune, nor 
actuated by any improper fear of calumny or death. Since from 
my childhood I had been devoted to the more liberal studies, and 
was always more powerful in my intellect than in my body, avoid- 
ing the labors of the camp, in which any robust soldier could 
have surpassed me, I betook myself to those weapons which I 
could wield with the most effect ; and I conceived that I was act- 
ing wisely when I thus brought my better and more valuable 
faculties, those which constituted my principal strength and con- 
‘sequence, to the assistance of my country and her honorable 
cause. 


__In 1641 he published the first of his pamphlets. It 
was entitled, “Of Reformation in England, and the 
Causes that Hitherto Have Hindered It.” If any are 
inclined to think it a pity that one with such capacities 
for poetry should compel himself to prose, they need 
only to read this pamphlet to be convinced that Milton’s 
Prose, if it was not itself poetry, was one of the best of 
all preparations for poetry. In this prose, eloquence 
reaches a very lofty strain. No English essayist or ora- 
tor or preacher can afford to be unfamiliar with the 
prose writing of Milton. There is a roll to it, like that 
of ocean waves driven by a mighty wind. It shows 


236 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


the power of language to express the most exalted emo- 


tions. 

Moral energy, hatred of unrighteousness, unconquer- | 
able devotion to truth, resistless determination to put. 
down oppression, uplifting of the whole soul to God—all | 
these, apart from Scripture, have never been put into) 
more soul-moving forms of expression than they have 
been by John Milton. The prayer which concludes the 
pamphlet on the Reformation has a majesty and ai 
pathos, combined with a long-drawn fervor and a soar- 
ing splendor of phrase, which would befit one of the; 
angels in the Apocalypse. I am bound, however, in all) 
good conscience, to say that Milton’s prose is noblest. 
when it approaches most nearly to poetry. When he is 
most of a poet, then he is most of a man. It is hard for 
him, indeed, to keep the poet under—there is a smol- 
dering fire that is ever ready to break forth; and when, 
it does flame out we have a grandeur of expression such} 
as has never been surpassed by any uninspired writer. 

Alas that the poetic instinct could not always rule! 
Side by side with these bursts of eloquence, or, rather, 
surrounding them, interpenetrating them, and some- 
times swamping them, we have great tracts of sonorous) 
and learned, but involved and entangled, speech, in’ 
which simplicity is lost sight of, and bitterness of parti 
sanship seems quite ready to make the worse appear 
the better reason. Here is the narrowness, as well as’ 
the sternness, of the Puritan. 

With all his knowledge of literature and of art, Mil- 
ton was from his youth something of a recluse. The 
broadening and humanizing process ended with his ae- 
parture from Italy... Henceforth for twenty years he 


a 











| 


| 


HIS FIERCENESS OF DENUNCIATION 237 


Merew himself into the conflict of opinions with an un- 
compromising rancor which sometimes makes even truth 
-and righteousness seem unlovely. The close of that 
‘very prayer which pictures the redeemed as “clasping 
‘inseparable hands, with joy and bliss in overmeasure 
forever,” exults over the fallen foes of liberty, and pre- 
dicts that, “after a shameful end in this life,” they 
“shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and 
‘deepest gulf of hell,” where they shall remain forever, 
“the basest and lowermost, the most dejected, most 
‘underfoot and downtrodden, vassals of perdition.” 

Here is a fierceness of denunciation which reminds 
‘us of Sumner’s assaults upon slavery. There have been 
‘days in our own national history when even Quakers 
found great satisfaction in reading the imprecatory 
psalms. We cannot understand the fulminations of 
‘Milton, until in imagination we put ourselves back into 
‘the times of the Long Parliament. Milton’s prose is 
full of imprecations upon the enemies of liberty because 
‘they are regarded as the enemies of God. His pam- 
phlets breathe a spirit of lofty justice, and they appeal 
to the conscience of mankind. There was in them, to 
use Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘a proud, majestical, high 
scorn,” which served an excellent purpose in combating 
aristocratic pretence and royal prerogative. 

Their influence in the crisis of the struggle for free- 
dom in England was only second to the influence of the 
sword of Cromwell. The essay entitled “The Tenure 
of Kings and Magistrates,” printed in February, 1648— 
49, immediately after the execution of King Charles, 

and “proving that it is lawful and hath been held so 
through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to 


oe 


238 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due convic. 
tion to depose and put him to death,” is so scathing an 
indictment of the dead “traitor, murderer, and public’ 
enemy,” and so tremendous a justification of that act of! 
State by which he was condemned to death, that it will’ 
forever stand in human history as the unanswerable plea 
of the Regicides. That it did its work is plain, when’ 
we remember that in 1663, Twyn, a bookseller, was 
hanged, drawn, and quartered, for printing a book which 
merely reproduced the substance of Milton’s argument, 
It is one of the yet unexplained mysteries of the time) 
that Milton himself, when so many friends of liberty 
perished, was not called to anwer with his life. 

The ‘ Areopagitica” is the noblest of all defenses of 
an unfettered press. Milton says: F 










Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny | 
of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; 
nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extrac- 
tion of that living intellect that bred them. . . As good almost 
kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reason- 
able creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, | 
kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. . 
Many a man lives a burden to the earth ; but a good book is the | 
precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up | 
on purpose to a life beyond life. . . We should be wary, there-_ 
fore, what persecution we raise against the living labors of public. | 
men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored — 
up in books : since we see a kind of homicide may be thus com- | 
mitted ; sometimes a martyrdom ; and, if it extend to the whole | 
impression, a kind of massacre ; whereof the execution ends not | 
in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and 
fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality 
rather than a life. 





Yet this masterly “Speech for the Liberty of Un | 
F | 





| HIS INFELICITOUS MARRIAGE 239 
licensed Printing ”’ would never have seen the light, if 
Milton had not felt called upon to defend his own pre- 
vious conduct. On August 1, 1643, he had printed 
without a license, because no license could ever have 
seen obtained, a tract entitled “The Doctrine and Dis. 
upline of Divorce.” In it he had argued that “ indis. 
sosition, unfitness, and contrariety of mind are proper 
vauses of divorce,” and that proper laws on this subject 
should be included in the new Reformation in England. 
[he modern world knows well, and Milton’s enemies did 
iot delay to point out then, that his views had been in 
sreat part determined by his hasty and infelicitous mar- 
lage. 
Until his thirty-fifth year, this lofty idealist, with his 
Oaring imagination and his devotion to books, had 
lwelt, as Wordsworth phrases it, “like a star, apart.” 
3ut when he visited Richard Powell, at Forest Hilleim 
Jxfordshire, to collect five hundred pounds which that 
fentleman had long owed his father, the star came 
trangely down from its heavenly heights, and entangled 
tself in the golden curls of Mary Powell, the daughter 
f his host. It was clearly a case of love at first sight, 
t least on Milton’s part, and he afterward sorrowfully 
onfessed that love, though not blind, has but one eye, 
nd that eye is often deceived. He seems to have 
lothed the pretty creature that attracted him with a 
whole array of graces and virtues drawn solely from the 
vardrobe of his fancy. Because she smiled, he thought 
‘er appreciative; because she was silent, he thought 
\er wise. 

In less than a month after their first meeting, Milton, 

stead of his five hundred pounds, took Mary Powell 


240 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 





















back to London with him, as his wife. There, instead 
of the fresh air and the flowers of the country, she had 
the smoky city, and rooms that overlooked a churchyard, 
After the first feasting, life came to be ineffably dull 
Milton was much with his books, and the young. bride 
began to sigh for the gayety of her home. Milton was 
as handsome as a statue, but, alas! he seemed almost as 
stiff and cold. Unless you are a Pygmalion, you cannot | 
love a statue, and Mary Powell Milton was no Pygma- 
lion. Nor did her husband find her the wise and ap- 
preciative wife he had expected her to be. Sad to say, | 
he found her stupid, instead. In his subsequent pam. 
phlets he cites, as a proper cause for divorce, “inability 
for fit and matchable conversation.” He talks of “a 
mute and spiritless mate”; “a living soul bound toa_ 
dead corpse.” He declares that it is “enough to abase 
the mettle of a generous spirit, and sink him to a low | 
and vulgar pitch of endeavor in all his actions” ; enough , 
to drive a man “at last, through murmuring ane despair, | 
to thoughts of atheism.” 

The husband, in this case, it must be acknowledged, . 
was of too lofty and severe a nature to be fitted for | 
matrimony. Rigid self-discipline had prepared him for 
autocracy in the household. He had ideas with regard 
to the subjection of women which belonged to pagan and , 
classic, rather than to Christian times. It is quite pos- 
sible that he undertook to command, when he shou 
have ruled by love. The verses in “ Samson Agonistes, — 
where the athlete laments his failure to resist Delilah, 
seem a reminiscence of this experience of Miltons, 
though they intimate no consciousness on his part of 
wrong : 7 


Therefore God's universal law 

Gave to the man despotic power 
Over his female in due awe, 

Nor from that right to part an hour, 
Smile she or lower ; 

So shall he least confusion draw 

On his whole life, nor sway’d 

By female usurpation, or dismay’ d. 


HIS DOCTRINE OF DIVORCE 241 
; 
| 


' But it took two to make a bargain here. Mrs. Mil- 
on was doubtless stupid, but she was not stupid enough 
o endure subjection without a protest. Asit had taken 
mly a month for Milton to win her, so it took him only 
.month to loseher. She accepted an invitation to visit 
ier old home, and the visit was prolonged to two years. 
Mlilton’s remonstrances were met with silence ; his mes- 
engers were driven away by her father with contempt. 
‘he pamphlet on “ Divorce” seems to have been writ- 
en and printed in hot haste. In May he began his 
ourtship ; in June he married ; in July his wife deserted 
um; in August he stirred the country with a tract ad- 
Oocating almost unlimited liberty of divorce. 

Divorce for the man, however—not for the woman. 
“he wiser should govern the less wise. Man being the 
uperior being, God pitied him most and gave him the 
ight to divorce his wife, but gave to the wife no corre- 
ponding right to divorce her husband. Mrs. Milton 
epented after two years, when her royalist father had 
ost his fortune. She made most humble confession and 
ubmission, pleading that “her mother had been the 
hief promoter of her frowardness.” Milton instantly 
Wrgave the past and took her back. But the end was 
ke the beginning. Milton’s family life, though he was 


iree times married, was only at rare intervals a happy 
Q 


one. The proud, self-contained, exalted spirit carried 
his head too far above the clouds to elicit much of sym. 
pathy from either wife or children. Milton was by. 
nature a lonely man—to a certain extent his loneliness, 
was the penalty of his greatness. | 

I am detailing these features of his life, in order to 
show the influences that changed a poet of the depart. 
ing Renaissance into the stern and majestic poet of the 
Protestant Reformation. The story will not be com. 
plete without some allusion to Milton’s blindness. We 
have seen how the foundation for this was laid by the. 
premature vigils of his studious boyhood. Too seden-, 
tary a life in the succeeding years brought on a rheu-| 
matic affection, and this was naturally accompanied by, 
increasing weakness of the eyes. When he entered the 
service of the Commonwealth, at the age of forty-one, his / 
sight was already getting dim. A year later, when Sal | 
masius published his defense of King Charles the First, | 
the Council of State requested Milton to prepare a reply, | 
This required much work by candle-light. Milton’s left) 
eye was useless already, and there were warnings that! 
before long the right eye might fail also. His physicians | 
admonished him that total blindness might result, if he. 
persevered. But, with the alternative before him of. 
blindness on the one hand and desertion of duty on the| 
other, he chose blindness. ‘“ Urged,” he says, “ by the. 
heavenly Counsellor who dwells in conscience, I would. 
have shut my ears to A‘sculapius himself speaking in 
his Epidaurian temple.” ; | 

He finished his reply, but he lost his sight. He| 
learned to dictate to amanuenses indeed, and he could 
still hear his favorite authors as they were read to him 


242 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION | 
J 
|; 





HE LOSES: HIS SIGHT 243 


by others. But the labor of investigation in his library 
was multiplied many-fold|) He was dependent now. 
Imagine the great, imperious, self-absorbed man, after 
(Charles the Second had come to the throne; driven 
into hiding ; his friends exiled or beheaded; uncertain 
whether he himself might not yet be hanged ; his moth- 
erless children in a chronic state of mute rebellion 
against the task of reading to him in languages which 
they could not understand, unfilially conspiring with his 
servants to embezzle his money and to sell his books, 
and when he sought to alleviate his loneliness by an- 
other marriage, wishing rather they could hear that 
he was dead; and all this while increasingly afflicted 
with gout-calculi, accompanied by swelling of the joints, 
and twinges of pain at every movement of the limbs. 

- But worst of all was the blindness. Blind Samson, 
in the drama which constitutes his last great work, is 
simply the blind Milton in antique Grecian dress. Hear 
ais pitiful lament : 


O loss of sight, of thee I most complain ! 
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, 
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age! 
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, 
And all her various objects of delight 
Annull’d, which might in part my grief have eas’d, 
Inferior to the vilest now become 

: Of man or worm ; the vilest here excel me; 
They creep, yet see ; I, dark in light, expos’d 
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong ; 
Within doors, as without, still, as a fool, 
In power of others, never in my own ; 

| Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. 
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, 


244 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, 
Without all hope of day ! 












Such words as these mark the nadir of the poet’s 
sorrows. There were consolations also. To Cyriack 
Skinner, one of his old scholars and lifelong friends, he 
wrote in more calm and cheerful strain : 


Cyriack, this three years day these eyes, though clear, 
To outward view, of blemish or of spot, 
Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot ; 
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear 
Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year, | 
Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not 
Against heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot 
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer 
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask ? 
The conscience, friend, to have lost them, overphiga 
In liberty’s defense, my noble task, 
Of which all Europe rings from side to side. 


But more than this. The blind poet came to see that| 
blindness did not preclude work—it rather threw him 
back upon the work to which in his youth he had con- 
secrated himself, but from which the political struggles 
of his time had withdrawn him—threw him back upon’ 
it with an experience of life so enlarged that he was now 
a different man, with a new insight into truth and a new 


impulse of 
adventurous song 
That with no middle flight intends to soar 
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues 
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. 


We must go even further. The poet’s blindness, 
while it shut him out from the world of the natural, shut) 


| 
| 
| SHUT IN TO THE SUPERNATURAL 245 
him in, as it were, to the world of the supernatural. 
His ear became more attent to heavenly harmonies ; his 
‘spiritual eyes were opened, as the outward eyes were 
closed. The “troubled sea of noises and hoarse dis- 
putes,” upon which he had embarked in 1640, was from 
1660 to 1674 only as a distant murmur of the waves to 
one who has entered the harbor. Though straitened in 
means, his last years were, on the whole, years of rest 
and devotion. As the Cromwellian republic, for which 
he had sacrificed so much, proved to be only another 
Utopia, the vision of a celestial order dawned upon 
him, and the struggle between right and wrong on earth, 
with all the personal trouble through which he had 
passed, furnished him with the spirit and imagery of a 
new drama, the scene of which should be laid almost 
wholly in the supernatural world, which should describe 
the age-long war between God and Satan, and which 


should 


| : 
assert eternal Providence, 


| And justify the ways of God to men. 


Milton’s blindness drove him not only from the out- 
ward to the inward and from the sensible to the super- 
sensible for his subject—it drove him also to God, the 
source of true illumination. There is in all literature 
no more noble or pathetic prayer than that at the open- 
ing of the third book of «Paradise Lost,” in which he 
mourns “wisdom at one entrance quite shut out,” yet 
lifts up his soul to him who is himself Wisdom : 


So much the rather thou, celestial Light, 
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
Irradiate ; there plant eyes; all mist from thence 


246 THE POET OF THE’ REFORMATION 


Purge and disperse ; that I may see and tell 
Of things invisible to mortal sight. 


It is certain that Milton deals with the invisible more | 
than any other poet that ever lived. Like Jonathan; 
Edwards in his ‘“‘ History of Redemption,” he would re-. 
late a story which begins in an eternity past and ends in | 
an eternity to come, the whole life of angels and of men. 
being spanned by its mighty arch. Supernatural beings . 
play a greater part in this epic than in any other—the | 
persons of the Godhead and the celestial emissaries and 
servants of the Almighty do two-thirds of all the speak- | 
ing, and the other third is done by two specimens of | 
unfallen humanity whose thought and language tran: | 
scend all ordinary human standards. : 

The world into which the poet introduces us is not a | 
part of this universe—it is rather that empyrean which > 


subsisted before this universe had a being. The de- 


mands of such an epic as this are simply colossal ; the 
conception of it could come only to one to whom the sub- 
lime was as his native air; the mere statement of the - 


fact gives us one of the best explanations of the Mil 


tonic poetry and one of the best reasons for its power. | 


In order that we may better appreciate the greatness of 
‘Paradise Lost,’ the work resumed with such new ad- 


vantages after twenty years of enforced silence, and | 
may understand what manner of “singing robes” the | 
great poet then put on, it will be indispensable to dis- | 
tinguish between Dante’s universe and Milton’s uni | 
verse, and to see how much more supersensual and ideal | 


the latter was than the former. 


Both Dante and Milton were believers in the Ptole- | 





| 
) 


' MILTON’S SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSE 247 


‘maic or geocentric theory of the universe. Milton in- 
deed had heard of Copernicus, and he seems to have 
‘suspected the new scheme of things to be true; but all 
his education and all the ideas of his time were of the 
older sort, and, for poetic purposes at least, he thought 
it not wise to change. It was not in this universe, how- 
ever, Ptolemaic as it was, that Milton laid the scene 
of his epic. Dante's hell and purgatory, on the con- 
trary, and even his heaven, were parts of this present 
visible frame of things. Hell was that tremendous 
cone-shaped cavity in the very earth beneath our feet, 
which Satan’s falling mass and bulk had hollowed out 
when he was thrust from heaven and came hurtling down 
upon our sublunary planet, crashing through its succes- 
sive strata till gravitation brought him up standing at 
the center and held him fast there at the very bottom 
of the pit. 

Purgatory, to Dante’s mind, was a mount on this 
earth, on the side opposite to the mouth of hell, com- 
posed of the material dislodged by Satan’s fall and made 
to bulge out when that material fled from his hated 
presence. And what was Dante’s heaven? Why, it 
was simply the concentric spheres which in the Ptole- 
maic system enclosed this earth and revolved around it 
as their center. In those spheres, the moon, the sun, 
the planets were fixed, and surrounding all was the Pr7- 
mum Mobile, so called because it moved all the rest, but 
itself never moved at all. Here God himself dwelt. 
This was the abode of the Almighty and of the most 
xalted saints. But Dante’s heaven was as definite in 
xtent as Dante’s earth. The Primum Mobile had its 
bounds, and everything in existence could be weighed 


248 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


and measured. William Watson characterizes the Dan-) 
tean sublimity as ‘“‘ mysticism tempered by mensuration.”. 

The essence of the sublime is its suggestion of the 
infinite. Macaulay’s essay on Milton makes its best 
point by showing how much more sublime Milton’s in-+ 
definite descriptions are than any of the definite state, 
ments of Dante. Dante would excite our imagination, 
by giving us the size of Satan in feet and inches; by 
this intrusion of earthly and finite measures he limits: 
and degrades. It is the old error of the pictures and! 
images of the Roman Church. Milton has in him the 
spirit of Protestantism and the spirit of true art—hey 
suggests, but he does not define. There is an air of| 
vastness about his poetry; the very absence of fixed | 
limits permits the imagination of the reader, nay, com-| 
pels his imagination, to spread its own wings and soar} 
Milton’s Satan is incomparably grander than the Satan) 
ote Dante: | 

But I wish now especially to point out what Macaulay 
seems not to see, namely, that Dante’s whole universe 
is infinitesimal compared with that of Milton. For Mil. 
ton hangs Dante’s whole universe as a mere drop in the 
center of his empyrean. Milton, being a Protestant, | 
has, of course, no purgatory, and his heaven and hell. 
are both outside of Dante’s universe. At the begin-| 
ning God dwells in an infinite heaven. Beneath him is) 
a weltering chaos, formless and dark, yet containing the | 
material of the world that is to be. Angels of many) 
ranks and endowments are created, to be his servants | 
and companions, long before the earth or man appears. 
When the Son of God is exalted above them and they! 
are bidden to worship him, there is rebellion and war in | 





















| 
| TEMPTATION OF OUR FIRST PARENTS 249 
heaven; Satan and the rebel angels are cast out of 
heaven and thrust down to the lowermost point of 
chaos, and the abode constructed for them and by them 
becomes hell. Nine days they fall; nine days they lie 
stupefied upon the burning marl; during six days of 
these nine the Almighty creates our universe, and sus- 
pends it like a solid sphere at that point in the floor of 
heaven where Satan and his host burst through when 
they fell. When the fallen archangel gathers strength 
and essays to pass through chaos on his way to tempt 
mankind, he sees the new-created universe hanging in 
space so far above him that it appears, in comparison 
with “the empyreal heaven, extended wide in circuit... 


once his native seat,”’ 


| 
| 


in bigness as a star, 
Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon. 


Into this universe, hard, solid, opaque, and illuminated 
only from the empyrean above, there is but one open- 
ing, and that is at the point of attachment to heaven. 
Satan perceives a gleam of light from the staircase, not 
yet withdrawn, by which angels went up and down. 
There he enters, and entering, all the flaming systems 
of orbs that constitute our universe dawn for the first 
time upon his sight. He makes his way to our sun, 
and, on pretence of being a belated spirit just returned 
from some distant errand in heaven, he inquires about 
God’s new creation. Uriel, the archangelic regent of 
the sun, unsuspectingly directs his steps to earth. There 
the adversary finds our first parents, clad only in the 
majesty of spotless innocence and “imparadis’d in one an- 
‘other’s arms.” Filled with jealousy, he plans their over- 


| 


T ples, 


250 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 






throw. Raphael is sent from heaven to instruct them: 
and prepare them to resist ; and here come in, after the’ 
fashion of Homer and Virgil, three whole books of in- 
formation with regard to the war in heaven, Adam’s 
previous experiences, and Milton’s whole scheme of 
philosophy and theology. 

The historical background of the drama being thus. 
complete, the tragedy can proceed to its sad climax.) 
Satan tempts, our first mother and father fall, the Son} 
of God comes down to pronounce their doom, the guilty, 
pair incriminate each other and sink into despair. But at) 
last they pray; and in answer to that first evidence of | | 
penitence, the same Archangel Michael, who is sent to | 
expel them from Paradise, comforts them on their way | 
by two whole books of prophecy. All the future his- 
tory of redemption is unfolded to them; they are taught | 
that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s 
head; they are promised a return to paradise when dis- ' 
crane has done its work. So the heavenly Muse taught | 
John Milton to cover past, present, and future with his 
sublime epic, and to fulfill, in age and weariness and | 
pain and solitude, the purpose, formed at least thirty | 
years before, to sing 


Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit 

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world, and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat. 


It is not true that the poem met with a cold recep- | 
tion from the public. The impression that it did so is. ! 
probably derived from the fact that the author received 


TEMPTATION OF OUR FIRST PARENTS 251 


or his work only five pounds down, with promise of 
fteen pounds more for the three succeeding editions. 
Sut this was partly due to Milton’s printing it just after 
he great fire of London, when all the booksellers were 
uined and any literary venture was hazardous. Though 
he book actually brought to the poet and his family only 
ighteen pounds in money, worth perhaps two hundred 
nd fifty dollars in our day, it gave at once to its author a 
ame second only to that of Shakespeare. Dryden not 
nly called it “one of the greatest, most noble, and 
aost sublime poems which either this age or nation has 
roduced,” but he was compelled to say also, “This 
aan cuts us all out, and the ancients too!”’ 
In that Philistine age, the Philistines themselves re- 
eived a shock comparable only to that which Samson 
iad given them of old; and Masson, at the close of his 
ix-volume biography of Milton, quotes “Samson Ago- 
listes,”’ as expressing the poet’s triumph in contem- 
lating the effect of his great work upon his contempo- 
aries : 

But he, though blind of sight, 

Despis’d and thought extinguish’ d quite, 

With inward eyes illuminated, 

His fiery virtues rous’d 

From under ashes into sudden flame, 

And as an evening dragon came, 
Assailant on the perched roosts 

And nests in order rang’ d 

Of tame villatic fowl ; but as an eagle 
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads. 


So Virtue, given for lost, 
Depress’ d, and overthrown, as seem’d, 


Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most, 


252 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


When most unactive deem'd ; 
And, though her body die, her fame survives, 
A secular bird, ages of lives. 


Nor is it true that Milton himself regarded his “ Para- 
dise Lost”’ as inferior to his “ Paradise Regained.” He 
simply hoped that the fame of the former might not 
prevent a due consideration of the merits of the latter, 
He would not have the victory of Satan, the hero of the 
first epic, obscure the victory of Christ, the hero of the| 
second. The “Paradise Lost” appeared in 1667, when. 
Milton was fifty-nine. The actual writing of it had 
occupied seven solid years. The poet had but scvall 
more years to live. But he filled them up with noble 
work. Before the first great poem was published, young 
Ellwood, a friend of Milton’s, borrowed a manuscrif 
copy of it. When he returned it, he said to the poet, | 
“Thou hast said much here of ‘Paradise Lost,’ but} 
what hast thou to say of ‘Paradise Found’?” Milton 
sat some time in a muse, but returned no answer. The’ 
final answer was the publication of « Paradise Regained,” 
in which our Lord’s temptation in the wilderness, with 
its foiling of Satan’s arts and its winning of eternal life | 
for man, is set over against Adam’s temptation in the. 
garden, with its defeat and its incurring of universal 
death. 

The later epic indubitably shows some falling off | 
the poet’s powers; the supernatural vein has already 
yielded the best of its ore; earth must now be the main | 
scene of the drama ; the piercing splendors of the poet’s | 
earlier verse give place to something more like erand 
and sonorous prose. Yet now and then the old inspira. 


———— 












———— 


CAN THE HIGHEST POETRY BE DIDACTIC? 253 


jon seems to seize him; flame bursts out from the 
»mbers ; as when he describes 


| Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
| And eloquence, native to famous wits 


| Or hospitable, 

and bids us 
Thence to the famous orators repair, 
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence 
Wielded at will that fierce democratie, 


Shook the arsenal, and fulmin’d over Greece 
To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne; 


or, when he closes the poem with the acclaim of angels 
to the victorious Son of God: 
Now thou hast aveng’d 
Supplanted Adam, and, by vanquishing 
Temptation, hast regain’d lost Paradise. 


- Milton is a didactic poet, and perhaps the most criti- 
eal question that can be asked with regard to his place 
in literature is this: Is the dogmatic element consist- 
ent with the very highest poetry? Our age is inclined 
to deny this. It is a part of the current theory of art 
in general, that the artist should only reproduce what 
he sees, and thus hold the mirror up to nature. He 
must do this simply because he is smitten with the love 
of nature’s beauty and longs to express the passion of 
his soul. The ulterior aim of teaching interferes with 
spontaneity and freedom, and without spontaneity and 
freedom no true poetry is possible. We deny the 

remises as well as the conclusion. The theory that 
art consists simply in imitation, is the relic of a bygone 


{ 


254 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


age that knew nothing of the idealizing and the creatiy | 
powers of the human imagination. What the poet sees, 
moreover, will depend upon what the poet zs; if he is 
a sensual soul, he will revel in dreams of sense, and will 
strive to reproduce them; if he is an ardent lover of 
purity and goodness, he will embody these in ‘“ thoughts 
that breathe and words that burn.” 

It is vain to say that the poet shall not onan: ; if a 
is a true poet, he cannot help teaching. No man ever 
yet made strong impression on his fellow-men without: 
being a great believer: «I believed, therefore have I 
spoken,’ might be the motto of every leader of man- 
kind. « Entire intellectual toleration,” said Mrs. Brown- 
ing, “is the mark of those who believe nothing.” And: 
believing something involves antagonism to its opposite; 
in the words of Coleridge, “He who does not with- 
stand, has no standing-ground of his own.” Advocacy 
of truth, denunciation of error, these are instincts of| 
those who see. “When any truth becomes central and | 
vital, there comes the desire to utter it,” as Dr. Storrs) 
has well remarked. And shall the poet, who is simply: 
the most deeply seeing man, be shut out from the advo- | 
cacy of truth and the denunciation of error, simply’ 
because he is a poet? Nay, rather, because he is a’ 
poet, he will give truth wings ; he will be her champion ; | 
he will bring all the powers of his soul into her defense. | 

The poet then not only may be a doginatist—he must | 
be a dogmatist. But he must be more. He must not. 
only possess the truth, but the truth must possess him. © 
He must have a soul great enough to apprehend it, not ! 
only in its bare logical forms and in its isolated particu- 
lars, but in its broad reaches of connection and in its | 












| 
| MUST POETRY CONFORM TO SCIENCE? 255 


power to rouse the deepest emotions. He must see it 
as deauty, and must be so ravished by the sight that he 
cannot contain the vision within himself, but must pub- 
lish it to others. Imagination, spontaneity, passion— 
these are not originally angels of darkness, but angels 
of light. Their highest service is to utter God’s mes- 
sages of righteousness and salvation. Isaiah and John 
are none the less, but rather the greater poets because 
they are teachers. And Milton, that 


Mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies, 
Skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity, 
God-gifted organ-voice of England, 


as Tennyson calls him, is none the less a poet because 
he has so definite and dogmatic an aim. With all his 
conviction, he seeks to conquer by beauty ; he feeds 


on thoughts that voluntary move 
Harmonious numbers ; 


and in his best writing he is conscious of the rush and 
impulse of a higher and larger Love and Wisdom. 

The scenery of the “Paradise Lost” is so unearthly, 
and the poem makes natural law so much the sport of 
arbitrary will, that some have dousted whether Milton 
‘can retain his hold upon future ages. We meet the 
doubt with the simple denial that any one of the world’s 
‘greatest poems depends for longevity upon its conform- 
‘ity to correct science. Homer will never cease to be 
the world’s great epic teacher, even though his universe 
is peopled with Naiads and is under the rule of the 
upper and the nether Jove. Virgil will live forever by 
‘virtue of his sweet and sonorous verse, even though his 


250 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 






subterranean realms are reached by an easy and litera} | 
descent from the volcanic hillsides of Naples. Who. 
will refuse immortality to Dante because his purgatory: 
bulges out from our southern hemisphere, or to Shakes- | 
peare because he furnishes a seacoast to Bohemia ? 

No, the currency of poetry is independent of such| 
matters of geography or astronomy; the truth it sets 
forth is truth of a different sort ; its universal and ever-' 
lasting hold upon the human spirit consists in its ability | 
to lift man above mere space and time into the region | 
of the spiritual and eternal. It does this in two ways, 
and in each of these ways John Milton has no superior, | 
First, he is our greatest English master of literary form, 
We can well believe John Bright, when he said that his| 
own oratory was built upon John Milton. But since} 
perfection of form can never exist by itself alone, we| 
may add, secondly, that our poet proclaims to all ages 
the greatest moral message. Behind the form is sub- | 
stance such as never entered into Homer’s or Virgil's} 
or Dante’s or Shakespeare’s verse, namely, the pro-! 
foundest conception of man’s apostasy from God, and of) 
his recovery from ruin through Jesus Christ. b) 

Milton has not the spontaneity of imagination that j 
distinguishes Shakespeare, nor has he so large a nature, 
but his sense of form is more unfailing, and in loftiness | 
of character he towers far above the bard of Avon. | 
Puritan as he is, he is more of an aristocrat, and more) 
of a man, than is Shakespeare. His nobility of poetic | 
form is but the expression of a lofty soul, thrilled to the | 
center of its being with the greatest of possible themes 
—the struggle of good and evil, of God and Satan, and 
the triumph of the Almighty in the redemption of man.’ 


HIS TREATISE OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 257 


Nhen this theme grows old, then will “ Paradise Lost”’ 
md “Paradise Regained” grow old. But so long as 
nan recognizes and values his own immortality, so long 
vill the poetry of Milton vindicate its claim to be im- 
nortal. 

With most poets, we are obliged to gather their doc- 
rine from their verse. In the case of Milton, we get 
idditional information from his biography; but, besides 
his, we are particularly favored by the fact that Milton, 
if all the great poets, was the one and only systematic 
heologian. ‘In his early life he had planned a treatise 
m Christian truth; in his last years he composed it. 
-uriously enough, it was never printed during his life- 
ime; the very existence of it was forgotten; at last the 
manuscript of it, tied up in a bundle with the original 
copy of his State Letters, was discovered among the 
umber of the State Paper Office in London, in 1823. 
50, after a disappearance lasting nearly a century and a 
aalf, the key to Milton’s poetry came to light, and Ma- 
saulay justly signalized the event by the publication, in 
he “Edinburgh Review,” of his famous first essay on 
ohn Milton. Though unfortunately it has never yet 
rained wide recognition in the theological world, this 
‘Treatise of Christian Doctrine” is so original and so 
ible a discussion of fundamental truth, that it merits 
areful attention. 

/ At many points it shows a daring independence, and 
in anticipation of views only recently propounded or 
hought tolerable in the Christian church. Yet its doc- 
rine is proclaimed with a confidence and calmness 
Vhich are themselves impressive. The importance and 


value which the author ascribed to his work are indi- 
| AR ‘ 





258 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


cated by the fact that he begins it as if it were an apos. 
tolic general epistle: “John Milton, Englishman, to all 
the churches of Christ, and also to all everywhere on 
earth professing the Christian faith : Peace and knowl. 
edge of the truth, and eternal salvation in God the 
Father, and in our Lord Jesus Christ.” He divides his 
treatise into two parts—a theoretical part, as to Chris- 
tian knowledge, and a practical part, as to Christian! 
duty. We can deal only with the former of these, 
But since our aim is to consider Milton’s poetry espe 
cially in its theological aspect, we may be permitted a 
somewhat minute inspection of the great features of his 
doctrinal system. | 

First of all, then, Milton is an unwavering believer in 
the infallibility and sufficiency of the Bible as God's 
revelation of truth to men. Though his formal teach- 
ing with regard to Holy Scripture is reserved for the| 
later portion of his treatise, it is plain, even from the| 
beginning, that he assumes the divine inspiration of 
every part of the Old and the New Testaments. Hel 
gives no proof of this, but declares that the word of, 
God carries with it its own evidence. Clearly, he writes’ 
for those who are Christians already, not for those who 
doubt the essentials of the Christian faith. 

Yet this rigid doctrine of inspiration is held in a 
somewhat large and liberal way. It does not claim the 
absolute truth of every statement of Scripture taken by 
itself. There are many sorts of composition, and the| 
Holy Spirit can make use of them all. He can set) 
before us the complaints of Job, and the doubts of Solo-| 
mon. “The Bible,” says Milton, in his “ Areopagitica,” | 
‘brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against 



















AN ARMINIAN DOCTRINE OF DECREES 259 


Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.” It 
is necessary to zzterpret Scripture, therefore; and every 
man has the right to interpret for aaa For this 
purpose he has the help and guidance of the Holy 
Spirit. There is an inner light, as well as an outer 
standard. In one place, Milton’s words would at first 


sight seem to sanction the Quaker doctrine: “The 
Spirit,” he says, “is a more certain guide than Scrip- 
ture, whom, therefore, it is our duty to follow.” But, 


taken in connection with the supremacy given to Scrip- 
ture everywhere else in his writings, this must be under- 
stood to mean, not that the Holy Spirit is a co-ordinate 
source of truth, but only that his interpretation is so 
indispensable that even the Scriptures would fail to be 
apprehended aright without it. 

~ Milton, in the second place, is an Arminian, so far as 
respects his doctrine of the divine decrees. Though 
God foreknows all events, he has not decreed them 
wbsolutely; he only decrees that, if his creatures act 
30 and so, such and such will be the consequences. 
Here I quote his own words to show how remarkably 
1e could anticipate certain methods of statement now 
current even among moderate Calvinists, yet statements 
which in those days would have been thought heresy 
tself. «Future events,” he says, “will happen certainly, 
ut not of necessity. ‘They will happen certainly, 
yecause the divine prescience will not be deceived ; but 
hey will not happen necessarily, because prescience can 
lave no influence on the object foreknown, inasmuch as 
t is only an intransitive action.” 

| Thus far the modern Calvinist might assent, though 
le would claim that God’s decree to create at all, when 





260 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 





he foreknew the results, was to all intents and purposes | 
a decreeing of those results, the decree, however, in the 
case of moral evil, being a permissive, and not an effi. 
cient, decree. But when Milton applies his principle to) 
the matter of salvation, he takes ground which the Cal 
sinist cannot hold with him. “There is no particular) 
predestination or election,” he says, ‘‘ but only general,” 
He means, as Masson has expressed it, that John or 
Peter is not predestined to be saved as John or Peter; ‘| 
but believers are predestined to be saved, and John and 
Peter will be saved if they are in the class of believers.” 
Of course this is a denial that God bestows any special 
grace to make John or Peter a believer ; and so it must 
be regarded as the denial of a fundamental principle of | 
Calvinism. This Arminian doctrine must be considered, | 
however, as a later development of his theology, for in 
« Areopagitica,” printed twenty-five years before this} 
treatise was written, he had mentioned “the acute and. 
distinct Arminius,’ but had spoken of him as “pa 
verted,” 

In his views of the Person of Christ, thirdly, Milton 
was not an orthodox Trinitarian, but a high Arian, 
Here too, we must recognize a change from the poet’ 3. 
way of thinking in his earlier years. In 1629, in his 
wonderful «Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Native 
ity,” he had written of “the Son of heaven’s eternal 
King ”’ 


That glorious form, that light unsufferable, 

And that far-beaming blaze of majesty, 
Wherewith he wont at heaven’s high council-table 
To sit the midst of trinal unity, 

He laid aside ; and, here with us to be, 


j AN ARIAN DOCTRINE OF CHRIST 261 


i Forsook the courts of everlasting day, 
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay. 


In 1641 he closed his first prose-pamphlet, “Of Refor- 
‘mation,’ with a prayer to the “One Tripersonal God- 
‘head,” as in that same pamphlet he had called the 
Arians “no true friends of Christ.” 

But in the fifth book of “ Paradise Lost” Milton has 
come to be of a different mind ; now he attributes a be- 
ginning of existence to the Son; he makes the sin of 
the rebel angels to consist in their refusal to recognize 
the Lordship of him whom God in these following 
words sets over them: 


Hear, all ye angels, progeny of light, 
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers; 
Hear my decree, which unrevok'd shall stand. 
This day I have begot whom I declare 
My only Son, and on this holy hill 
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold 
At my right hand: your head I him appoint; 
And by myself have sworn, to him shall bow 
All knees in heaven, and shall confess him Lord. 


Here God’s eternal decree, to which corresponds an 
‘eternal Sonship, is interpreted as if it were a temporal 
decree to which would correspond a Sonship beginning 
in time. And though, in the third book of the same 
poem, we read: 

. Thee next they sang, of all creation first, 
Begotten Son, divine Similitude, 

In whose conspicuous countenance, without cloud 
Made visible, the Almighty Father shines, 
Whom else no creature can behold; on thee 
Impress’ d the effulgence of his glory abides, 


262 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


Transfus’ d on thee his ample spirit rests. 
He heaven of heavens, and all the powers therein 
By thee created; 


{ 
d 
we are compelled to interpret this by the later theologi- 
cal treatise. That teaches us that “the Son of God did. 
not exist from all eternity, is not coeval or coessential 
or coequal with the Father, but came into existence by. 
the will of God to be the next being to himself, the 
first-born and best beloved, the Logos or Word throug 
whom all creation should take its beginnings. .. God 
imparted to the Son as much as he pleased of the di- 
vine nature, nay, of the divine substance itself, care 
being taken ae to confound the substance with the 
whole essence.’ | 

This is very like the doctrine of Sir Isaac Newton, | 
Christ may be said to be divine, in the sense that he is. 
next in rank to God and has been endowed by God with 
divine power to create, but he is inferior to the supreme 
Godhead. It was perhaps well for Milton that his trea-. 
tise was not published in his lifetime, for Arianism was 
not a heresy which those times winked at. He must 
have remembered the fate of Bartholomew Legate, an 
Essex man and an Arian, who was burned to death at 
Smithfield, March 13, 1613. King James the First : 
asked him whether he did not pray to Christ. Legate’s . 
answer was that “indeed he had prayed to Christ in 
the days of his ignorance, but not for these last seven . 
years ;’ which so shocked the king that “he spurned at 
him with his foot.” At the stake Legate still refused _ 


} 


| 


to recant, and so was burned to ashes amid a vast con- | 
flux of people. | 
In the fourth place, as to Milton’s doctrine of Crea- 














A MONISTIC DOCTRINE OF CREATION 263 


tion, he was a Monist, while yet maintaining the inde- 
pendence and freedom of the human will. He is not 
an idealistic, but a materialistic, Monist. All things are 
forms of matter more or less ethereal. But this matter 
is not something either lifeless or self-subsistent—it is 
an efflux or emanation from the Divine Being himself, 
and it partakes of his indestructibility. “No created 
thing” therefore “can be finally annihilated.” Raphael, 
the archangel, explains: 


O Adam! One Almighty is, from whom 

All things proceed, and up to him return, 

If not deprav’d from good, created all 

Such to perfection, one first matter all, 
Endued with various forms, various degrees 
Of substance and, in things that live, of life, 
But more refin’d, more spirituous and pure, 
As nearer to him plac d., 


But see how carefully the poet guards himself from 
pantheistic conclusions. The original matter of which 
all things are made, being a part of God’s own sub- 
stance, is not evil, but good. Yet ‘God has voluntarily 
loosened his hold on such portions of this primeval mat- 
ter as he has endowed with free will, so that they may 
originate independent actions not morally referable to 
God himself.” Hear Raphael once more, as he speaks 
fe Adam : 
a Son of heaven and earth, 

Attend! That thou art happy, owe to God ; 
That thou continuest such, owe to thyself, 
That is, to thy obedience ; therein stand. 
This was that caution given thee ; be advis'd, 
God made thee perfect, not immutable : 

And good he made thee ; but to persevere, 


§ 


264 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION | 


He left it in thy power ; ordained thy will | 
By nature free, not overrul’d by fate | 
Inextricable, or strict necessity : | 
Our voluntary service he requires, 

Not our necessitated ; such with him 

Finds no acceptance, nor can find ; for how 

Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve 
Willing or no, who will but what they must 

By destiny, and can no other choose? 


In all this John Milton anticipated the modern doctrine 
of Lotze, of Dorner, and of Browning. 

Fifthly, in his opinions with regard to the origin of 
the soul, our great poet is a Traducian. In opposition 
to the current orthodoxy of his time, which was F ederal- 
ist and Creationist, he held that the soul, like the body, 
comes to us all byinheritance. Indeed, Milton goes fur- 
ther than this. “He has no faith in soul as separate) 
from, and inhabiting, the body. He believes in a certain | 
corporeity of the soul. Mind and thought are rooted in 
the bodily organism. Soul was not inbreathed by God 
after the body was formed. The breathing into man’s 
nostrils was only the quickening impulse given to that) 
which had life already. God does not create souls every | 
day. Man is a body-and-soul, or a soul-body, and he 
transmits himself as such.”’ , 

These quotations are not Milton’s own words, but 
they are the summing up of his doctrine which is given 
by Masson, his great biographer. Special creation is: 
indeed taught pictorially in book seven of the “ Para-) 
dise Lost,’ both with reference to the lower animals | 


and to man. There we read: 








f 


i 


The grassy clods now calved ; now half appeared a 
The tawny lion, pawing to get free 





—--__—___—- 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOTERIOLOGY 265 


His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds 
And rampant shakes his brinded mane ; the ounce, 
The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole 

Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw 

In hillocks : the swift stag from under ground 

Bore up his branching head. 


But we must interpret this as only pictorial, for in the 
fifth book the whole modern philosophy of evolution 
seems to be hinted at in Milton’s verse. He speaks of 
the various degrees and forms of the “one first mat- 
wer, as 

Each in their several active spheres assign’ d, 
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds 
Proportion’d to each kind. So, from the’ root 
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves 
More aéry, last the bright consummate flower 
Spirits odorous breathes : flowers and their fruit, 
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d 
To vital spirits aspire, to animal, 

To intellectual ; give both life and sense, 

Fancy and understanding ; whence the soul 
Reason receives, and reason is her being, 
Discursive or intuitive ; discourse 

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, 

Differing but in degree, of kind the same. 


Milton’s Anthropology and Soteriology are so stoutly 
orthodox as to excite but little curiosity. He is a be- 
liever in the universal sinfulness of the human race and 
in the common guilt of the Fall. Humanity, when it 
‘comes into the world, is just what Adam made it by his 
transgression. Man is doomed to death for his sin. 
Die he, or justice must; unless for him 


Some other able, and as willing, pay 
The rigid satisfaction, death for death. 


266 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


But, in his great love, Christ became incarnate for our 
salvation. Having taken our human nature by being 
born of a virgin, he had resting upon him all our expo- 
sures and liabilities. ‘He voluntarily submitted him- | 
self to the divine justice,” and suffered death, the pen- | 
alty due to human sin. So he made atonement, and re- 
deemed all believers at the price of his own blood; as} 
Michael teaches Adam ; 


——— 


Slain for bringing life; 
But to the cross he nails thy enemies, 
The law that is against thee, and the sins 
Of all mankind, with him there crucified, 
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust 
In this his satisfaction. 


We can object to these statements only upon the 
ground that the poet conceives of the relation of men 
to Adam and to Christ respectively in somewhat too | 
formal and mechanical a way. If he had followed his 
Traducian view of the soul to its logical conclusions, it | 
would have made him a sound Augustinian in his view 
of sin, and an advocate of the ethical or realistic view | 
of the atonement. | 

We pass these doctrines, however, to consider, in the 
sixth place, Milton’s Eschatology. Here we can anticl | 
pate his conclusions from what we know of his premises. 
If soul and body are not two, but one and inseparable, 
then at death the whole man dies, soul and body to- 
gether; and not till the resurrection, when the body is | 
revived, does the soul live again. ‘The millions who | 
have died since Adam”’—I quote once more from his | 
biographer—“ are all asleep, thick and sere as the au- | 


~ 


= ¥ 








ps ee — 





$$ —_____-— 


| 
| 
| 
| A DOCTRINE OF SOUL-SLEEPING 267 


tumnal leaves in Vallombrosa ; they shall not wake till 
the last trump stirs their multitudes. For the dead, 
however, the intervening time is annihilated. They die; 
but so far as their consciousness is concerned, they re- 
vive the next instant to be alive with Christ forever.” 

At this point too, Milton’s later thinking carried him 
away both from Scripture teaching and from his earlier 
beliets. We may well prefer the doctrine he held from 
1637 to 1639 when, in “Il Penseroso,” he spoke of 
unsphering 


The spirit of Plato, to unfold 

What worlds or what regions hold 
The immortal mind that hath forsook 
Her mansion in this fleshly nook. 


or when, in “ Lycidas,” he wrote the most pathetic of 
all elegies for the friend of his youth drowned in the 
Irish Sea : 


Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more; 

For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, 

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor; 

So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, 

And yet anon repairs his drooping head, 

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore 

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky; 

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, 

Through the dear might of him that walked the waves, 
| Where other groves and other streams along, 
With nectar pure his oozy iocks he laves, 

And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, 

In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. 
There entertain him all the saints above, 

In solemn troops, and sweet societies, 

That sing, and, singing, in their glory move, 
And wipe the tears forever from his eyes. 


208 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 



















But to the aged Milton all this was fancy and not 
fact. His dead friend was unconscious and would be 
unconscious until the morning of the resurrection, 
When should that morning dawn? Ah, the poet held, 
not only to soul-sleeping, but to the pre-millennial advent 
of Christ. The day of judgment with which Christ’s 
coming is so closely connected in Scripture he believed. 
to be no single day, marked by the rising and setting of 
the sun, but a period a thousand years in duration. 
Judgment to him was not so much an act as a long pro. 
cess, continuing through Christ’s millennial reign on 
earth, and “ wound up at last by a new revolt of Satan, 
his final overthrow, the sentencing of devils and bad, 
men, the destruction of the world by fire, the banish.) 
ment of the bad to hell, and the exaltation of the saints: 
to a new heaven and a new earth created for their 
enjoyment.” i 

The seventh and last point of Milton’s theological. 
belief which I can notice is his doctrine of the church,| 
Here too, there was a constant progress from his early 
to his later years, and in my judgment, a progress on 
the whole toward truth rather than toward error. He 
began by being a Puritan member of the Established 
Church. When he entered the service of the State 
he was a strong Presbyterian, and his first political 
pamphlets: were written in the interest of Presbyter 
ial government in the Church of England. But he 
found that Presbyterianism at that time represented 
as much of intolerance and tyranny as belonged to the 
Roman Church. In his poem “On the New Forcers, 
of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” these lines 
occur : 





| A BAPTIST DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH 269 


Because you have thrown off your Prelate Lord 
And with stiff vows renounced his Liturgy, 

To seize the widowed whore Plurality 

From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorr’d ; 
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword 

To force our consciences that Christ set free, 

| And ride us with a classic hierarchy?.. . 

Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent 
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul 
Must now be named and printed heretics. . . 
But we do hope to find out all your tricks. . 
When they shall read this clearly in your charge, 
New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large. 


_ As from being a Churchman he had become a Presby- 
terian, so from being a Presbyterian he became an Inde- 
pendent, or Congregationalist. The ideas of republican 
civil government that were gaining headway in the army 
had, as their correlative, ideas of absolute democracy in 
the government of the church. And then, ten years of 
further thought and experience made him theoretically 
a Baptist. Cromwell did not profess any particular 
opinion, but he was more nearly a Baptist than anything 
else, and Cromwell’s influence was strong over Milton. 
‘The poet, however, was more consistent both in his 
republicanism and in his Independency than was Crom- 
well himself. Milton feared the monarchical tendencies 
‘of the protectorate; and, on the subject of absolute 
freedom of opinion, he was a monitor to the Protector. 
Not only did Milton hold, in theory at least, to the 
fundamental Baptist principle of separation of Church 
and State, but he agreed with Baptists in his rejection 
of infant baptism, and in his belief that immersion in 
water is the proper form of baptism. Infants, he says, 





270 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


—— 





“are not to be baptized, inasmuch as they are incompe. 
tent to receive instruction, or to believe, or to enter inte 
a covenant, or to promise or answer for themselves, or! 
even to hear a word.” Of baptism he thus speaks: 
“The bodies of believers, who engage themselves to 
pureness of life, are immersed in running water, to sig: 
nify their regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and their 
union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection,» 
These quotations are taken of course from his “ Chris# 
tian Doctrine,” but, in the twelfth book of the “ Para. 
dise Lost,’ we have the following significant lines: 





i 
| 
To teach all nations what of him they learned, 
And his salvation, them who shall believe 
Baptizing in the profluent stream, the sign 

Of washing them from guilt of sin to life 
Pure, and in mind prepared, if so befall, f 
For death like that which the Redeemer died. 


| 

I am far from maintaining that John Milton was ever: 
himself immersed, or that he ever formally identified! 
himself with any local Baptist church. I must add,! 
indeed, that before the end of his days there came to 
be a Quaker element in his religion. He became in-| 
different to times and places of worship; he held id 








f 


Sabbath to be abrogated, with the Mosaic law of which! 
he considered it a part; in his latest years “he ceased 
to attend any church, he belonged to no religious com: | 
munion, and he had no religious observances in his” 
family. Considering the profoundly religious character 
of his mind,” says Masson, “this excited considerable | 
surmise among his friends, but he gave no explanation.” | 
The explanation, we may imagine, was simply this: The 





| 


A QUAKER ELEMENT IN HIS RELIGION a7) 


blind and dependent old man, who could not attend 
even a conventicle except as he was led, had simply per- 
mitted himself, partly from the inertia of failing strength, 
| and partly from dislike of all religious forms even 
_though they were the simplest, to swing to the opposite 
extreme of no religious service at all. What he excused 
in himself he could not have justified in others ; for, in 
‘this very “Treatise of Christian Doctrine,” he counts 
individual membership and support of Christ’s church 
_to be the duty of every believer. 
We have spoken of the influence of Cromwell, but 
there was another influence upon Milton’s thinking 
‘more important still, and that was the influence of 
Roger Williams. This most lovable man, yet born agi- 
tator, republican, and Baptist, did a work in England as 
well as in America—a work that only of late years has 
come to be recognized. When the Long Parliament 
had loosened the grip of Charles and of Laud upon the 
civil and religious liberties of England, Williams, in the 
year 1643, made a visit to his English home. Twelve 
years before, he had emigrated to Massachusetts; seven 
years before, he had founded a tiny settlement at Provi- 
dence in Rhode Island. Cotton Mather tells us what 
‘Manner of man he seemed to orthodox New England- 
ers to be. “In the year 1654,” says that distinguished 
divine, “a certain windmill in the Low Countries, whirl- 
‘ing round with extraordinary violence, by reason of a 
violent storm then blowing, the stone at length by its 
rapid motion became so intensely hot as to fire the mill ; 
from whence the flames, being dispersed by the high 
winds, did set a whole town on fire. But I can tell my 
veader that, above twenty years before this, there was a 


272 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 


whole country in America like to be set on fire by the. 
rapid motion of a windmill in the head of one particular | 
man ;” and Cotton Mather proceeds to say that this. 
man. was Roger Williams. | 

The church to which Roger Williams belonged in. 
Salem had excommunicated him because he had been, 
baptized and had baptized others, establishing thereby 
the first church in America of the Baptist faith. It, 
was not in human nature—it was certainly not in Roger 
Williams’ human nature—when he returned to England | 
to cease propagating his new faith. The windmill con- 
tinued to run and set other towns on fire. He pron, 
claimed, far in advance of his time, the duty of abso- 
lutely separating Church and State. He was the guest, 
for a whole year, of the younger Vane. Here he natu ) 
rally came frequently in contact with Milton, Vane's, 
warm friend and admirer. He found Milton, on account 
of his divorce pamphlets, put out with the Presbyterians, | 
thrown among the sectaries, and, as the poet himself, 
tells us, in “a world of disesteem.”’ Williams now pub- 
lished his “Bloody Tenet of Persecution, with a Plea, 
for Liberty of Conscience.” He was the apostle of) 
Voluntaryism. His book made great stir in London, 
but it especially commended itself to Milton. From, 
Roger Williams, the poet probably imbibed not only. 
this particular portion of Baptist doctrine, but much) 
more with regard to the nature and the subjects of, 
Christian baptism. | 

If circumstances had permitted the absolute separa: 
tion of Church and State in England, we may believe) 
that Milton would have steadfastly argued in its favor. | 
But even Cromwell could not accept the principle of 





‘ 





| 
| 
| WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF PROTESTANTISM? 273 
universal toleration—popery at least must be suppressed. 
And Miton seems to have yielded to the inevitable. 
After the Restoration, disestablishment seemed to him 
only a dream. The final doctrine of the pamphlets 
published in his lifetime is simply this: Since not 
reason or the church, but the Scripture, is the one and 
only authority and standard, there must be “wo liberty 
of conscience util and without acceptance of the Scrip- 
tures, but after and with that acceptance, a// liberty.” 
But in his “Treatise of Christian Doctrine,’ he comes 
squarely to the ground of Roger Williams, and opposes 
interference of the State or civil magistrate in any way 
in matters of religious belief. 

Travelers in Italy tell us that even educated Italians 
refer to the Bible ideas and expressions which are found 
mly in the “Divine Comedy.” The popular theology 
af the English-speaking race is, in a similar manner, to 
1 considerable extent derived from “Paradise Lost.” 
Many notions with regard to the nature of angels and 
with regard to the temptation of man have come to us, 
iot from Moses, but from Milton. It is well for us, 
hherefore, carefully to estimate the claims of the Mil- 
‘onic theology and its correspondence or non-corre- 
spondence with Scripture. We have called Milton the 
oet of the Protestant Reformation. Can we still sub- 
icribe to this dictum, when we find him, in his doctrinal 
reatise, declaring himself to be an Arminian, an Arian, 
| Monist, a Traducian, a Soul-sleeper, a Pre-millenarian, 
nd, last of all, a Baptist ? 

We can answer this question only by asking another, 
md that is: What is the essence of Protestantism ? 


Ne reply, Protestantism is the protest of mankind 
| s 


against the substitution of the church in the place of 
Christ, and of the priest in the place of Scripture, 
Roman Catholicism had turned means into ends. George, 
Herbert has stigmatized the error in his couplet : | 


274 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION 
| 


What wretchedness can give him any room, 
Whose house is foul, while he adores his broom ! 





The Protestant Reformation, on the other hand, dispos 
sessed all these intermediaries between the soul ann 
God. It insisted that every man must have personal) 
dealings with Christ. He is not to come to Christ: 
through the church, but to come to the church through 
Christ. He is not to take his belief from the priest, 
but from the word of God. He is bound to read an¢ 
to interpret the Scripture for himself, and he is person: 
ally responsible to God for the conclusions to which he 

J 


—- ~ — 


comes. 

This is Protestantism; this is Puritanism; and Mil, 
ton is a Puritan of the Puritans. He will put his con 
science into no ecclesiastical keeping, even though it 
may be the keeping of the Westminster Assembly ol) 
Divines. So he thinks for himself and writes for him: 
self. While he believes all men to be sinners, and sak) 
vation to be only through Christ, he shows how flexible 
and daring the intellectual spirit of Puritanism may be 
It is not so much the old orthodoxy, as the new the: 
ology, that appears in him. He is the poet of Protest: 
antism, by illustrating its large range of freedom, ance 
by turning its rugged doctrine into song. 

How much the politics and religion of the Common: 
wealth owe to Milton may be judged by the utter con: 
tempt into which they fell for a hundred and fifty years; 





| THE CREATIVE POWER OF Cou RELIGION 275 


The Long Parliament voted themselves out of office 
when they determined that none of their number should 
be members and soldiers at the same time—the Restor- 
ation wits stigmatized them as “self-denying devils.” 
Cromwell said to the artist, “Paint me iustas lam—— 
wrinkles and all!”—the Cavaliers called him «Noll 
Maggot-face.”” When that “steel-clad theorist’ found 
that his first levies were eager for prayer meetings and 
holdings-forth at every halt, he said, “I have a lovely 
company! ” and prophesied that they would hold their 
own against the gentlemen of the king—but in the next 
generation all this religious zeal became an object of 
ridicule. Lofty patriotism gave place to.swinish self- 
indulgence. Milton suffered obloquy with his party. 
Dr. George H. Clark, the biographer of Oliver Crom- 
well, tells us that “in the year 1710 an engraver was 
at work in Westminster Abbey upon a Latin inscription 
to the memory of the poet, John Phillips. He came to 
the words: Uni Miltono Secundus—‘Next to Milton.’ 
The Dean of the Abbey stopped the engraver; that 
hallowed building must not be desecrated even by the 
aame of Milton on another man’s monument. John 
Phillips, with his poetry, must go down to posterity 
without it.” 

Only during the last fifty years has the world begun 
(° do justice either to the Puritans or to Milton. We 
vannot understand the one without understanding the 
ther. It is only Milton who shows that the iron faith 
of the Puritans was compatible with the highest art. 
His gorgeous verse has glorified the time in which he 
ived and the doctrine for which he contended. His 
rose is a defense of the great Protector more telling 


| 


276 THE POET OF THE REFORMATION | 
than the “Memoirs of Carlyle.” His poetry, the rea 
product of that stalwart age of faith and freedom, doe, 
more to prove the idealizing and creative power of tru 
religion than Macaulay’s eulogy of the Puritans. Thi 
age of the Commonwealth would seem hard and coarsi 
and unrespectable without him. Since Roman Catholi 
cism has Dante for its poetical representative and ex 
positor, it is well for us, and for the cause of truth an 
righteousness, that we have in Milton the poet of thi 
Protestant Reformation. 4 

Many years ago, on a summer evening, I wandereé 
through the ruins of Ludlow Castle, in the West o 
England, where in 1634 the great Earl of Bridgewater 
Lord President of Wales, celebrated his entrance inti 
office. The castle has its own wall separate from thi 
wall of Ludlow town, from which town the visito 
passes to the castle over moat and drawbridge. Thi 
immense thickness of the walls, and the strength of th’ 
position on a rocky promontory at the confluence of tw 
beautiful streams, were enough of themselves to attrac’ 
interest. But the goal to which every foot now tend 
is the great banquet-hall, now dismantled, where, as | 
part of the pomp and pageantry of the earl’s inaugura 
tion, Milton’s Masque, entitled ‘Comus,’” was firs) 
represented. | 

I could imagine the end of the hall turned into | 
stage; a mimic forest; the young daughter of the hous) 
nies the part of the lady, lost in the thickets of th 
wood; the necromancer and his rout of monsters wit! 
heads of beasts and bodies of men; the “barbarous dis 
sonance of Bacchus and his revelers’’; the temptatio: 
of innocence; the invocation of Hee the triumph o 








y 





| 


| 
| THE CREATIVE POWER OF TRUE RELIGION 277 


virtue. When that Masque was first acted, Milton was 
‘a youth unknown, and the castle honored him. Two 
hundred and fifty years have passed since then, and now 
it is Milton who gives to Ludlow Castle all its honor. 
To the pure ambition which that early poem breathed, 
the poet was true through all his life, and, in spite of 
‘French critics, who make a mock at sin and cannot 
‘understand how art and faith can ever dwell together, 
ithe words of the Attendant Spirit in “Comus”’ still 
express, to those who have ears to hear, the mission of 
his poetry : 


} 
\ 


Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court 
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 
Of bright aérial spirits live inspher'd 

In regions mild of calm and serene air, 
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 

| Which men call Earth, and with low-thoughted care, 
Confin’d and pester’d in this pinfold here 
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being, 
Unmindful of the crown that virtue gives, 
After this mortal change, to her true servants, 
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats ; 
Yet some there be, that by due steps aspire 
To lay their just hands on that golden key 
That opes the palace of eternity : 

To such my errand is. 





ea 
an 
[4 
kX) 
O 
O 








GOETHE 


THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


Woo is the greatest German? There are two, and 
only two, who can compete for the honor—Luther and 


Goethe. In native genius as well as in influence upon 


the national life we can find points of similarity between 
them. Both were richly endowed with vigor and emo- 
tion; both shaped the faith and the literature of Ger- 
many. 

But their nature and work were more unlike than like 
each other. Luther's moral and religious instincts mas- 
tered him; he freed his people from the tyranny of 
ecclesiasticism, and led them back to Scripture and to 


God. Goethe was a man without conscience; he was 


the instrument of a merely literary emancipation, while 
he re-established, so far as he could, the reign of pagan 
self-dependence and of moral indifference. 

Luther’s whole being was pervaded with faith in a 
personal and living God, and his songs were half-battles 
for truth and righteousness. Goethe believed only in a 
God who was identical with nature; who consecrated 


the lower impulses of man as well as the higher; who 


could be approached without confession or repentance 
of sin; and his writings effected only an zsthetic, never 
an ethical, reformation. So long, then, as we judge 


greatness by moral and spiritual standards, we: must 


281 


282 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


| 


regard Luther, and not Goethe, as the greatest of the, 
Germans. And yet, since he is the type of a remark-| 
able literary development, Goethe is worthy of profound 
study. He has been called the supreme literary artist. ; 
I propose to speak of him as the poet of pantheism. | 
«Wilt thou the poet understand? Dwell thou in the 
poet’s land!” No one can comprehend Goethe without : 
knowing something of Germany and its previous liter- | 
ary history, of Frankfort, where the poet was born, and! 
of Weimar, the scene of his greatest productive activity, | 
Until Goethe appeared, Germany could hardly be sal 
to have had a literature of its own. Frederick thé) 
Great, while he made Prussia independent in politics, | 
had enslaved his country to French standards of com- | 
position. The traditions of the French Academy, with’ 
its dramatic unities and its magniloquent proprieties, had _ 
exerted a benumbing influence upon German authors, 
until freedom and life had almost departed. Pride in 
their own rich and sonorous language gave place to con- | 
| 

| 








tempt. Their national history seemed hardly worth the. 
chronicling. The land of the Méebelungenlied, the 
land of the Reformers, seemed to furnish no subjects | 
for poetry or for art. German writers set themselves ) 
to copying the classics, or rather to copying French 
copies of the classics. | 

But a new breath of life was stirring. <A _ spirit of 
revolt was in the air. Rousseau and the French Revo- } 
lution began to have their analogues, if not their ef- 
fects, in Germany. Shakespeare was read, and brought ' 
his readers back to nature. Herder and Lessing | 
and Klopstock showed independent powers of criti: | 
cism and creation. But it was chiefly Goethe who, like | 








FRANKFORT, AND GOETHE'S PARENTS 283 


a literary Moses, led his people out from bondage into 
liberty. It was his masterful originality that first con- 
‘vinced his countrymen that there could be a native 
growth of German literature, and that they need no 
longer be in subjection to foreign powers. 

Frankfort was a fit city from which the movement 
‘might begin. It was not only a free city of the Holy 
Roman Empire, but it was the city where for centuries 
the emperors had been crowned. Its annual fair 
brought together the fabrics of the East and the West, 
and gave a sort of cosmopolitan atmosphere to the place. 
The burgher class was wealthy and enterprising, per- 
vious to modern ideas, while at the same time proud 
of the medizval traditions of the town. From this 
burgher class Goethe sprang. His father was a re- 
tired government official, with the title of Counsellor. 
He was a man of education, and he had traveled 
in Italy. Methodical in his habits, and with little of 
business to occupy him, he devoted himself mainly to 
the training of his wife, and his two children, John and 
Cornelia. 

His wife, a bright, airy, pleasure-loving creature of 
‘seventeen, found, when she married the wise Counsellor 
of thirty-eight, that she had put herself under severe 
discipline. She had to spend most of the honeymoon 
in learning the piano, and in writing out Italian ex- 
ercises. She conceived an unwholesome fear of her 
husband, and she encouraged her children in all 
sorts of deceptions in order to escape from the rigid 
tule and scrutiny of their father. She declared that 
she had no gift for bringing up a family. She coaxed 
her offspring to be good, and whipped them if they 


284 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


cried, without inquiry into the causes either of their: 
goodness or of their grief. In short, she was.a child: 
with them. | 

Her one strong point was her endless story-telling, 
The evenings were beguiled with all manner of extem- 
pore dramas and fairy tales. The tales were continuous, 
like those of Queen Scheherezade When the interest 
was at its height and the hero or the villain was at the 
crisis of his fate, the story was suspended for twenty-. 
four hours and young Goethe and his sister were put to’ 
bed. His imagination, however, could not rest, and 
before he went to sleep he had devised an exit from the 
dramatic difficulty. Next morning he confided his in- 
vention to his grandmother. She was in collusion with 
the mother, and when evening came again Goethe would. 
be delighted to find that the story came out just as he. 
had expected. So the child lived in a world of poetry 
and romance, wonderfully adapted to stimulate his gifts 
to precocious development. 

The elements derived from father and from mother 
were each in their way admirable, yet each had its draw- 
backs and limitations. The father furnished to the son 
a love of order, a persistent industry, an omnivorous | 
appetite for knowledge. Yet with this there was a calm | 
and severe self-dependence, and a disregard of the feel- | 
ings of others when they crossed the plans of the party’ 
of the first part. The boy was held to work by the) 
father, as few boys have been. In his eighth year he 
wrote Latin with ease, and had made considerable. 
progress in Greek and in French. But the mother fur- | 
nished the doxhomze, the fresh insight into nature, the : 
charm of fancy, the warmth of feeling, the impulse to | 








| 


| 
| 
| ATTRACTIVENESS OF YOUNG GOETHE 285 
‘expression, which made common things glow with life 
and clamor to be described. 

_ But with these gifts of imagination and of utterance, 
there were great deficiencies. There was no reverence 
and no conscience. The moral idea was almost wholly 
lacking in Goethe’s mother. She hated pain, and she 
taught the forgetting of sin instead of repentance for 
it. An emotional religion she had, but no prostration 
of the sinful soul before the holiness of God. There 
was an easy-going confidence in the future that at times 
‘amounted to flippancy and even sacrilege. On_ her 
deathbed she was particularly anxious that the raisins 
should not be skimped in the cake for the funeral, and 


she replied to an invitation, that Frau Goethe was sorry 
torbe compelled to decline it, for the reason that just at 
‘that time she was engaged in dying. 


Goethe himself has described what he supposed to be 


his inheritance from his parents, in the well-known lines: 


My goodly frame and earnest soul 
I from my sire inherit ; 

My happy heart and glib discourse 
Were my brave mother’s merit. 


That goodly frame was indeed goodly. Though not 
great in stature, the poet was in point of physical beauty 


| 


. 


one of the noblest men that the world has ever seen. 
Jung Stilling speaks of his broad brow, his flashing eye, 
and his mastery of every company of which he formed 
‘a part. When he was young, he never entered a place 
‘of public entertainment or passed through a crowded 
street without finding that all eyes turned toward him 
and followed him with a sort of fascination. “ Vozla 


286 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


un homme!” said Napoleon, when Goethe retired from 
his interview with the emperor at Weimar. | 

A certain majesty of mien was natural to him, a calm, 
self-contained air, which is described as Olympian, and 
which gave the impression of inexhaustible resources, 
combined with just consciousness of power. He said) 
of himself that he had an innate aristocracy which 
made him feel on a level with princes. When the duke 
made him Privy Councillor and confidential adviser, it 
took but a little time for the newly elevated burgher to. 
subdue all murmurs of the ancient nobility, and to con- 
vince them that in serene dignity he surpassed them all. 
This dignity was not vanity, for Goethe was influenced | 
very little by mere desire for admiration. It was rather: 








| 


a lofty pride, a sense of greatness, an insight into, 
human nature, and a consciousness of larger knowledge! 
and ability than other men possessed. And it does not! 


| 
appear that either in childhood, youth, or manhood, this: 
proud and self-conscious spirit ever learned humility, or 
was taught to depend either upon man or God. | 

It was perhaps natural that such a man should have 
but few male friends. Men of independence were 
obliged to resign their independence or conceive ave 
sion toward a being so superior. But women were ordi-’ 
narily enthralled. He came, he saw, he conquenll 
because his whole bearing seemed to say that he knew 
their hearts, and that he had a breadth and sympathy 
of nature which they could completely rest upon. And 
this was partly true. His greatest gift was the-gift of 
a quick sensibility for all common things. The little: 
things of nature and of life stirred depths of feeling in| 


him. It was not love, it was not reverence; it was sim- | 





| 
| 


| 


INCAPABLE OF TRUE LOVE 287 


ple emotion. But women thought it was love, and they 


poured out their love upon him. He seemed to them 


_ the greatest star they had ever descried in the human 


| 


firmament, and in some respects he was, But he? Ah, 


) there was no star for him but that same Goethe-star— 
the star of self. 


It is said that he had the perpetual habit of falling in 
love, and the list of his lady-loves is very long. Six- 


teen of these have been catalogued and minutely de- 
‘scribed. Eight of them are scientifically classified as 
_ At, hotly and passionately loved. Five are enumerated 


as A2, to whom he was very intimately attached. Then 


follow a great number Br and Bz, to whom he gave a 
‘more transient adoration. One might say of them as 
Sainte Beuve said of Chateaubriand’s attachments : “’T is 
like the stars in the sky ; the more you look at them, the 


more you discover.” Professor Blackie has gone so far 
as to say that this talent for falling in love was an 


essential part of Goethe’s genius, that it was insepara- 


ble from his insight into character and life, and that it 


is to be commended rather than to be condemned. 


I venture to say that Goethe was incapable of any 
true love, and that all these passions were mere means 


of self-gratification and self-glorification. There was 


unquestionably an easy flow of sentiment which simu- 
lated love. But if love is self-devotion and self-impar- 
tation, Goethe knew nothing of this sacred and divine 
emotion. Up toa certain point his nature was stirred, 
but when he found that the object of his regard desired 
an exclusive and eternal affection, he drew back. It 
has been well said that the conception of living for 


another probably never occurred to him. The bright 





© 


288 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 








and cheerful mother to whom he owed so much was 
visited in Frankfort, because Goethe was her son, by 
every distinguished stranger who passed through the 
town; but the son visited her very rarely, and, during 
the last eleven years of her old age, he-visited her not, 
at all. His vacations were spent in other places than 
Frankfort, though Frankfort was not a hundred miles 
from Weimar. Nor are his few letters to her distin- 
guished by any special love or gratitude. 

His affair of the heart with Friederike Brion, the pas- 
tor’s daughter at Sesenheim, near Strasburg, was one 
in which it is difficult to acquit Goethe from the charge, 
of treachery. The sweet young girl gave herself to. 
him; the parents regarded the pair as virtually be-, 
trothed; but he left her, without explanations, to wait 
and pine in vain. It is said that he suffered for years| 
from self-reproach, but no sign of this appears in his 
account of the matter. What was a small thing to him, 
was a great thing to her. She refused excellent offers) 
of marriage, saying that to have loved a Goethe was| 
enough for one life. She fell into a consumption and) 
died, still loving her early but inconstant admirer. 

It would have been far better for Goethe’s soul, and 
far better for his genius, if he had married Friederike. 
It would have saved him from a long series of illicit 
connections which did much to benumb his moral sense, 
cut the wings of his imagination and limit his outlook) 
to merely earthly and temporal things. It would have 
prevented the composition of those Roman Elegies, 
which sing the praises of unhallowed love; it would, 
have made impossible the eighteen hundred love letters: 
to Frau von Stein; and still more impossible the seven- 















INCAPABLE OF TRUE LOVE 289 


en years of concubinage with Christiane Vulpius, 
hom he afterward took to be his wife. But the radical 
fect in Goethe's character was that which constitutes 
| e essence of sin everywhere, namely, the overweening 
ve of self. He looked upon others as mere instru- 
ments, to be used for purposes of self-advancement, and 
to be thrown aside so soon as he had exhausted their 
power to be of use to him. 

This is the secret of all his so-called love affairs, 
Under the portrait of the Frau von Stein, when he first 
saw it, he wrote: “ What a glorious poem it would be 
to see how the world mirrors itself in this soul!” He 
regarded women as furnishing mere studies of human 
qature. He played upon their affections, as upon harp 
strings, until he had possessed himself of every melody 
of which they were capable. He felt more or less, in- 
leed, but then he was always master of his feeling ; he 
iever by any accident permitted it to master him. 

Bettine von Arnim said to Lord Houghton that Goethe 
Teated women as, in his childhood, he treated flowers 
ind birds: pulling off the leaves to see how the petals 
vere joined to the calyx, or plucking birds to observe 
low the feathers were inserted into the wings. He 
subjected each woman who loved him to a process of 
piritual vivisection, in order that he might obtain liter- 
ny material. In the case of Kestner and his wife, he 
epaid the unmeasured adoration which the innocent 
air bestowed upon him, by misrepresenting his relations 
0 them in his “ Sorrows of Werther,” by staining the rep- 
itation of Kestner’s wife, and finally by berating Kest- 
er himself for the indignation he felt at the attack 
‘pon her honor, 

T 


{ 


290 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


Treachery in the case of Friederike, and ingratitud 
in the case of Lotta, were matched by Goethe’s indi 
ference to the cause of his country at the crisis of he 
fate. Napoleon had invaded Germany, and every patr. 
otic German was eager to drive out the invader. Th 
emperor, with his usual desire to lead men of though 
captive in his train, invited the poet of Weimar to a 
audience. Goethe accepted the advances of his country’ 
enemy, and flattered the conqueror. The poet's dé 
fenders are accustomed to argue that his greatnes 
made him cosmopolitan ; it was not the invader whor 
he flattered, but the man of might ; breadth of intellect 
we are told, renders patriotism impossible. This j 
true only if greatness absolves a man from all moré 
relations. And this was the view of Goethe. Evil an 
good were alike to be studied and admired. To knov 
the world and to reproduce it in literature, this was hi 
mission. And, to do this efficiently, he must be thoi 
oughly master of himself, and must reach the utmos 
pitch of self-culture and self-development. | 

There was an element of personal character here, an 
there was an element of philosophic theory. I believ 
that the character shaped the philosophy first of al 
and that then the philosophy in turn reacted upon th 
character. Let me, therefore, call attention primaril| 
to the moral attitude of Goethe in his early life. 4 
wonderfully gifted child, an object of the father’s prid 
and the mother’s indulgence, he early contracted a sel 
confidence that was phenomenal. Nothing seems eve 
to have disturbed it. 

The only possible exception was in his boyhood, whe 
his schoolfellows and himself wrote competitive verse: 















3 MORAL ATTITUDE IN EARLY LIFE 291 


He noticed that they thought just as well of their pro- 
_ductions as he thought of his, and for a moment the 
‘question occurred to him whether his own estimate of 
‘his work might not be a self-deception, as he felt assured 
‘theirs was. But these doubts of himself soon vanished, 
‘and they appear never to have returned. He was the 
‘most imperturbable believer in himself that ever attained 
| literary fame. By virtue of his powers, he regarded 
himself as pledged to make the most of himself. The 
| object was, not to serve God or man, but simply to 
‘gather in to himself whatever of knowledge or of power 
the world could give, and then to express himself in 
literature. ; 

_ This was not merely a spontaneous and constitutional 
‘tendency—it was the deliberate decision and purpose 
ot his life. Ina youthful letter to Lavater he writes : 

“The desire to raise the pyramid of my existence, the 
ase of which is already laid, as high as possible into 
‘the air, absorbs every other desire, and scarcely ever 
leaves me.” And he held on in this course to the end. 
In Faust, published only in his later life, one of the 
‘most admired verses has been thus translated by 
Carlyle : 


Like as a star, 

| That maketh not haste, 
That taketh not rest, 
Be each one fulfilling 
His God-given hest. 








But Boyeson points out that in the original there is no 
mention of God or of a “ God-given hest.’’ The proper 
franslation is: “Be each revolving about his own 


! 


weight ’—that is, about the center of his own personal- 


292 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


ity. Goethe's life was a self-centered life, and that, not 
from instinct but by choice. 

It cannot be said that this choice was the choice of 
short-sightedness or of invincible ignorance. At least 
once in his life he came in contact with a person whose 
character and aims were formed upon a totally different 
model, This was Fraulein von Klettenberg, a lady’ 
much older than Goethe, and suffering from an incur-) 
able disorder. Her patience and resignation attracted 
the young man’s attention, and she had opportunity to. 
tell him the story of a profound and eta 
Christian experience. An illness of his own at this: 
time made him more nearly conscious of weakness than 
he appears ever to have been before or after. The’ 
Moravian type of religion which his pious friend, like 
an older sister, sought to commend to him, made a deep 
impression, though a temporary one. 

It is characteristic of Goethe that this whole story of 
a life in God, a life of communion with Christ and of 
constant charity to man, is reproduced in “ Wilhelm 
Meister.” But it is found there in strange companion: 
ship. It is side by side with Wilhelm’s experiences 
behind the scenes of the theatre and with strolling 
play-actors, that we find these “ Confessions of a Beauti 
ful Soul,” as illustrations of certain facts of the universé 
that must be studied by a truly educated man. As we 
read the account of this spiritual and holy life, it seems 
as if no one but a Christian could ever have written it 
But like the sermon of Dinah, in George Eliot’s « Adam 
Bede,” this episode in “Wilhelm Meister” passes by) 
It has shown the author’s wonderful ability to enter int¢ 
phases of human life other than his own. It is the 








CONFIRMED BY A WRONG DECISION 293 





purely artistic delineation of a character with which he 
‘had no inner sympathy. It is a work of the imagina- 
tion and not of the heart—a mere chef-d’euvre of 
_dramatic representation. This touching story of a life 
| devoted to God is followed by other experiences, frivolous 
or commonplace. The greatest altitude reached is that 
of labor for labor’s sake. No unselfish heart-throbs of 
Goethe are recorded. On the whole, “ Wilhelm Meister ”’ 
ts only what Niebuhr called it, «A menagerie of tame 
creatures.” 
Yet the rejection of the true ideal and the clinging 
_to the false cost Goethe a struggle; it seems indeed to 
have been the turning-point of his moral life. The only 
_letter we possess from Goethe to Fraulein von Kletten- 
_berg was written just before his twenty-first birthday, 
and was apparently an answer to her earnest entreaties 
that he would devote his life to God. It seems to be 
his half-earnest, half-ironical effort to excuse himself 
from duty. He says: 
| I have been to-day to the Holy Communion, to keep in mind 
_the passion and death of our Lord ; and you can guess why I am 
amusing myself this afternoon, and at last intending in earnest to 
write a letter so long delayed. . . My connection with the religious 
people here is not exactly firm : at the beginning I had turned 
“myself very persistently toward them, but it seems as if it could 
-notbe. They are so mortally prosy, when they begin, that my live- 
liness could not endure it. . . People of moderate intellect think 
religion is everything, because they know nothing else. . . Another 
acquaintance, exactly the opposite, has been of no little use to me. 
pe rlerr , with the cool-bloodedness with which he has always 
regarded the world, thinks he has found out that we are set in this 
world especially to be useful to it, that we are able to make our- 
selves capable of this, whereto religion affords some aid, and that 
_ the most useful man is the best. 


\ 





| 


294 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


| 

Goethe did reach this conviction, and he has madi 
his Faust find happiness and heaven only when he uses 
his powers for the benefit of others. But the develop. 
ment of self must come first, and this self-development 
is to be carried on in man’s own strength. Prometheus; 
is the picture of Goethe’s ideal of life. Heis an artistic 
creator, who works for the interests of men, but he 
looks to heaven for nothing, and relies wholly upon his 
own power. From the summer of 1772, Goethe ne 
longer went to church and seldom prayed. 
It is instructive to observe that this putting away, 
from him of the distinctly religious ideal, and the sub-! 
stitution for it of the gospel of self-culture, preceded by 
only a single month Goethe’s acquaintance with Fried- 
erike at Sesenheim. It was because he feared she 
would hinder his mental growth that he left her to fade 
and die. He had no sense of duty to a personal God, | 


i 


hold him true to any human friend. I am 4 





that the refusal to yield his will to God’s claims upon 
him explains not only his treachery in this love affair, 
but the tone of moral indifference that afterward distin- 
guished his life. Theoretically there was before him 
the service of humanity. But practically, self-develop- 
ment and self-gratification, chosen first as means, be-. 


: 


came in themselves the end. Conscience, not listened. 
to, became benumbed. Pleasure assumed an importance 
and asserted a claim to which it had no right. 
“Extreme strictness,” he said, “tends to make a man 
melancholy.” The self-denial and self-sacrifice which 
Christianity accounts to be virtues, Goethe came to re- 
gard as vices. This is evident from the «“ Generalbeichte,” 
or ‘Form of Confession,” in which he makes his followers | 


j 





ACCEPTS THE GOSPEL OF SELF-CULTURE 295 


repent of the sin of having let slip an opportunity of 
enjoyment, and solemnly resolve never to be guilty of 
such sin in future. They vow to “wean themselves 
from half-measures, and live resolutely in the whole, in 
the good, and in the beautiful.” If this were simply, 
as Professor Seeley claims, a resolve to abstain from 
useless self-denial, it would be only the common Prot- 
estant revolt from monasticism, and there would be in 
it nothing reprehensible. But it was more than that. 
It was a determination to open all the avenues of the 
nature to enjoyment, without regard to the restraints of 
social tradition or positive law. 

He would develop all sides of his nature, gain all 
sorts of experience, taste all the pleasures that life could 
give. It was a pagan culture which he set himself to 
attain. He was “the great heathen”’ of modern times, 
and he was not ashamed to be known as such. He hid 
his face from the pain and suffering of the world, as the 
old Greeks did. The Cross of Christ, with its vicarious 
love and sorrow, was repulsive to him, for it was a con- 
trast and rebuke to his self-indulgent, self-seeking, self- 
exalting spirit. Goethe had in his heart turned away 
from the true God—the personal God, the God of holi- 
ness, the God who imposes moral law, the God who 
offers pardon through Christ—and he had put in his 
place a God of his own wishes and imagination, a nature- 
God, a God without personality or moral character, a 
God to whom evil and good are both alike, because both 
alike proceed from him, a God who is best served, not 
by self-restraint and self-sacrifice, but by the unhindered 
development of all our inborn instincts and powers. 
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson once lectured to the Woman’s 


296 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


Fortnightly Club, of Chicago. Its president said t 
him: “I regret that you were not here last week, Mi 
Emerson. We were discussing Goethe’s ‘Electiv 
Affinities,’ and we should have been happy to learn you 
views of the work.’ Emerson bowed, but maintaine 
a gracious silence. His interlocutor was not content 
but persisted: ‘‘What would you have said to us abou 
it?’’ “Madam,” he replied, “I have never felt that® 
had attained to the purity of mind that qualified me t 
read that book.’’ The “Elective Affinities,’ a work no 
of Goethe’s youth but of his mature life, was only thi 
frank expression of his loose conceptions of the marriag 
relation. A thin veil of sentiment partly hides ane 
partly idealizes illicit passion. The sentiment is mawk 
ish, and the evil intent is plain. There was in the mat 
a settled love of the impure. He was “the greai 
heathen,” in spite of all the light of the Christian dis 
pensation that shone around him. 

Goethe's history shows that he loved darkness rathei 
than light, because his deeds were evil. It was his 
heteropraxy that led to his heterodoxy. To one whe 
had made an essentially immoral decision, it was a great 
satisfaction to find what seemed to be a rational justi 
fication of his position. And this he did find in the 
philosophy of Spinoza. I do not mean that Goethe 
was a metaphysician or a lover of metaphysics. With 
his inborn love for clearness and for facts he even 
derided the philosophic schools of his day. He ex 
plains his own greatness by his avoidance of such spec 
ulation : 








Mein Kind, ich habe’s klug gemacht, 
Ich habe nie iiber’s Denken gedacht. 





amy 


EFFECT SUPON “HIS PHILOSOPHY 297 


“My wisdom has been, never to think about think. 
ming.” 


If he had thought more about thinking, he might 
possibly have scrutinized more sharply the system which 
he accepted, might have perceived its incongruity with 
the facts of human life, might have seen its utter inabil- 
ity to explain such things as sin and guilt, remorse and 
retribution. But Goethe did not accept the views of 
Spinoza upon rational grounds; he accepted them 
rather because they fitted in with a previous moral 
decision of his own. He has himself well said, “As 
are the inclinations, so are the opinions.” And Fichte, 
whom he ridiculed, uttered the same truth in the 
aphorism, ‘Men do not will according to their reason, 
but reason according to their will.” 

He read Spinoza in 1774, when he was twenty-five 
wears of age. ‘I well remember,” he writes, “what 


peace and serenity came over me when I first glanced 


over the surviving works of that remarkable man. This 
sensation was still quite distinct to me, though I could 
not have recalled any particular point. But I hastened 
forthwith to the works to which I was so much indebted, 
and the same sense of peace took possession of me. I 
gave myself up to reading them, and thought when I 
scrutinized myself that the world had never looked so 
Blear.”’ 

Far be it from me to deny that in the works of Spi- 
noza there is this charm for the mere intellect. His 
system is a system of Monism. There is but one Sub- 
stance, one aspect of which is extension, and the other 
aspect is thought. All the events of the universe follow 
from the nature of this one Substance. as the nature of 


298 . THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


the diameter follows from the nature of the circle.) 
There is no freedom, no purpose, no morality. It is a 
sort of Monism, but itis not an Ethical Monism. “The 
great systematic work of Spinoza,” says Hodge, “is en- 
titled ‘ Ethica’ ; but for real ethics we might as well con-! 
sult the ‘Elements’ of Euclid.” And though this one’ 
Substance is called God, it might far better be called: 
the Universe. 
Hegel was right when he declared the superiority of 
his system to Spinozism to lie in his substitution of! 
‘Subject’ for ‘Substance.’ “The true Absolute,” says | 
Seth, “must contain, instead of abolishing, relations ;' 
the true Monism must include, instead of excluding, 
Pluralism.” And this true Absolute, I may add, is a 
Personal Intelligence and Will, not bound to the Uni- : 
verse by necessity, but freely originating the Univers», 
and expressing in his relations to free moral beings not 
only his wisdom and power, but also his holiness and | 
love. 
Such a God as this Spinoza knew nothing of, anti 
Goethe knew the true God quite as little as Spinoza. | 
Hutton tells us that Goethe combined the pantheistic 
view of God with the personal view of man. But I) 
think it is clear that whatever personality is left to man 
becomes distinctly unmoral. If there is no freedom in > 
God, there can be none in man, and a personality with- 
out freedom is entirely illusory. Man is only a part of | 
the all-embracing Spirit of the Universe, a Universe. 
eternally changing indeed, but changing according to 
unchangeable laws. No attributes can be ascribed to | 
God—in fact, we can have no definite thought of him. — 
No special revelation can come from him. He is deaf 











| AND UPON HIS THEOLOGY 299 


to our entreaties. He speaks only in us. It is im- 
possible to make God an object of love, for love goes 
out only toward persons. Or, if we say that love to 
God becomes love for Nature, this means no more than 
rm we love the highest expression of God, namely our- 
selves. All tends to the exaltation of self and the 
weakening of the sense of obligation. God is within, 
not without. There, in the desires and aspirations of 
the individual soul, is to be found the only standard of 
morality. 

As Goethe had no definite thought of God, so he had 
no definite expectation of immortality—at least it was 
no present aid to him. ‘Such incomprehensible sub- 
jects lie too far off,” he said, “and only disturb our 
choughts if made the theme of daily meditation. An 
ible man who has something to do here, and must toil 
ind strive day by day to accomplish it, leaves the future 
world till it comes, and contents himself with being 
ictive and useful in this.’ And Faust’s words only 
xpress the poet’s own view: 


The sphere of earth is known enough to me, 
The view above is barred immutably. 

A fool who there his blinking eyes directeth 
And o’er the clouds of earth a place expecteth, 
Firm let him stand and look around him well ! 
This world means something to the capable ; 
Why needs he through eternity to wend? 

Here he acquires what he can comprehend. 


—_ ee 


Nhich simply means: Every man for himself, and the 
evil take the hindmost. There is no eye to pity, and 
0 arm to save. 

It is a proof of the blinding influence of sin, that 


300 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


Goethe maintained this plan of life to be unselfish 
Because he surrendered himself to self, to toil and learn 
to enjoy and to describe, he conceived himself as sub 
ject to the invisible Spirit of the Universe, and a) 
working for humanity. But the real nature of that in 
visible Spirit he persistently ignored; the moral lav 
which expresses his nature he put beneath his feet ; th 
revelation of his will in Christ and in Scripture he con 
temned. He describes his religion as one of self-confi 
dence, attention to the present, admiration of gods onk 
as works of art, submission to irresistible fate, futur 
hope confined to this world, the preciousness of post 
humous fame. This he considered to be the religion 0 
health and joy, religion not of the word, but of th 
deed—the acting out of man’s nature. 

It was, alas, only a maimed and stunted nature whic! 
Goethe had in mind—a nature in which both the ethica 
and spiritual elements were wholly lacking. And ye 
there were grains of truth even in this pantheistic viey 
which gave it a hold both upon the poet himself anj 
upon his readers. The immanence of God was a grea 
truth, exaggerated and perverted though it was b) 
being held in isolation and unqualified by the comple 
mentary truth of the divine transcendence. _ Even th 
Christian can see the sublimity of the words: | 








Was wiir ein Gott der nur von aussen Ssttesse, 
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse ? 
Thm siemt die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, | 
Sich in Natur, Natur in sich, zu hegen, 
So dass, was in Thm lebt und webt und ist, 

Nie seine Kraft, nte seinen Geist, vermtsst.+ 


—$$_ $$$ 





1««Spriiche in Reimen: Gott, Gemiith, und Welt.” 





GOETHE A NON-ETHICAL EVOLUTIONIST 301 


What God would outwardly alone control, 
And on his finger whirl, the mighty Whole? 
He loves the zzmer world to move; to view 

| Nature in him, himself in Nature too ; 

So that what in him works, and is, and lives, 

The measure of his strength, his spirit, gives.! 


As Goethe was a monist, so he was an evolutionist. 
He believed that man is an outgrowth of the animal 
creation, even as animals have come from plants. There 
is a blood relationship, he thought, between all organic 
beings. The oneness of things deeply impressed him. 
In his conception of the leaf as the typical form of the 
plant, and of all other organs as modifications of the 
leaf, he made one of those sage guesses into the mean- 
ing of nature, which are possible only toa genius. Nor 
were his utterances mere guesses. They were insights 
into truth, based upon large knowledge of facts. It 
was the intermaxillary bone, that taught him the kinship 
of man to the lower forms of life. But it was just in 
proportion as he turned his thoughts away from the 
higher ranges of human life and experience, that he 
seemed to utter truth. 

To the facts of the ethical world he became increas- 
ingly insensitive. He lost even the moral predilections 
of his early days, and became a cold and calculating 
egoist. His aim was to throw off every yoke and to be 
arbiter of his own destiny. His old age was that of a 
self-absorbed and fastidious Lothario, who sought con- 
tinually, but sought in vain, to renew the raptures of his 
passionate youth. Since all men are victims of circum- 
stance, and great men are great only because a certain 





1¢¢ Proverbs in Rhyme: God, Soul, and World.’’ 


302 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


demonic influence spurs them on, he never repented ol 
sin—indeed, sin for him was simply the mistake of 
ignorance, the stumbling of the child who thereby 
learns to walk. 
Nichts taugt Ungeduld, | 

Noch weniger Reue; 


Jene vermehrt die Schuld 
! 
Diese schafft neue. 





“Impatience avails nothing, and still less contritiolle 
the former only increases our guilt, while the latter 
makes us guilty anew.’ | 

Here was a soul that felt itself great enough to treat 
sin and guilt and pain and death as non-existent, or at 
least as matters with which it had no concern. Lessing 
said that the character of the Germans was to have no. 
character. If this is true, it is certain that Goethe was 


1 
i 


the typical German. But I do not hold it to be true, 
Tennyson was right in his “ Palace of Art” in making’ 
Goethe the type, not of German character, but of that 
irresponsible and godless spirit which cultivates art 
wholly for art’s sake: | 





I take possession of men’s minds and deeds ; 

I live in all things great and small ; 

I sit apart, holding no forms of creeds, 

But contemplating all. | 

Let us examine the effect of this pantheistic philoso-' 
phy upon Goethe’s personal life, and then upon his) 
literary productions. He went to Weimar at the invi-. 
tation of the duke. He was already a famous man. | 
He was made an important officer of the court, and | 
he became the duke’s most intimate friend. The duke 








| 
| 
| EFFECT OF PANTHEISM ON PERSONAL LIFE 303 
himself was noted for his loose talk and for his still 
looser morals. Society in his capital is described as 
only “imperfectly monogamous.”’ Schiller, in disgust, 
declared of the women of the court, “There is not one 
‘of them who has not had a /éaison.” Goethe not only 
‘did not set himself to better the morals of Weimar, but 
he fell in with the tide. He was the boon-companion 
of his sovereign in dances and drinking bouts, and, 
though his elder by seven years, was his aider and abettor 
in the maddest of pranks. «All reserve was laid aside 
between them from the first,” says his biographer. 
“They spent days and nights in each other’s society; 
they hunted, drank, and gambled together. On one 
Occasion they were seen cracking sledge-whips in the 
market-place of Jena for a wager. At night they fin- 
ished up with carousals, in which wine was drunk from 
human skulls.” 

Goethe was fresh from an engagement of marriage 
with a banker’s daughter of Frankfort—an engagement 
which the lady had herself broken off on account of 
Goethe’s vacillation and inconstancy. It was not long 
before he formed his celebrated connection with Frau 
von Stein, the wife of the Master of the Horse, six 
years Goethe's elder, and the mother of seven children. 
This connection lasted for twelve years. Goethe wrote 
a letter to her nearly every day. She visited with him 
‘and traveled with him. No term of endearment which 
the German language possesses, from “ darling” to 
“dearest angel,’ is spared in these multitudinous 
epistles. The Frau von Stein was not handsome, but 
she was a woman of birth and dignity, combined with a 
Vivacity, tact, and subtle charm of manner, such as 









304 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


Goethe up to this time had been a stranger to. For! 
the first time he met a woman who was his equal. He 
declares that her influence upon his literary work was 
next to that of Shakespeare. There are those who re- 
gard the poet’s relations to his friend as purely Platonic, 
We have only his letters to her, not her letters to him, 
When he took Christiane Vulpius to his house without 
marrying her, the Frau von Stein rebelled, either at the 
rivalry or the wrong, recalled the letters she had sent, 
-and so the close friendship between them came to an 
end. But it had illustrated Goethe’s new version of, 
the commandment: “ Thou shalt love thy neighbor and: 
thy neighbor’s wite.”’ | 
But before this break-up of intimacy, there came the 
visit of Goethe to Italy. He regarded the year there: 
spent as the turning-point of his life. He had become 
wearied of official duties at Weimar, which absorbed his! 
strength, and he longed for freedom to devote himself, 
exclusively to literature. Strange to say, he regarded) 
the traditions and proprieties of Weimar as fettering; 
his development, and he sought in Italy to live a life) 
modeled after pagan art and pagan morals. His ethical} 
sense was so blunted that he could not understand Frau. 
von Stein’s objections to the illicit connections which he’ 
formed in Venice and in Rome, and which in his letters) 
he frankly avowed to her. In Italy he determined to. 
live in the senses as well as in the intellect, and when) 
he returned to Weimar his connection with Christiane: 
began. What shall we say of a man who, after he has 
done a young girl the greatest wrong, can yet write 
to his best woman friend: “ What kind of a relation is’ 
it? Who is defrauded by it? Who lays claim to the! 





q 








| 





ja a 


| 
J 


" 


AN EGOTISTIC AND LONELY OLD AGE 305 


| 
sentiments which I give to the poor creature, and who 
to the hours I spend with her ?”’ 

It does not seem to have occurred to him that he 
owed something to the poor creature he was injuring. 
Asa matter of fact, the humiliating position in which 
she was put, as his housekeeper but not his wife, led 
her to intemperance. Slighted by the very friends 
whom Goethe most honored and loved—-he himself 
permitting the slight—she became so addicted to drink 
as to make him miserable, even though he made her 
the slight reparation of marrying her after seventeen 
years of concubinage. Goethe's two sons inherited the 
passion for drink from the mother, and the eldest, 
his idol, died in Rome as the result of a drunken de- 
bauch. The family became extinct in the very next 
generation, and so the sins of the father were visited 
upon his children. 

How shall I picture Goethe’s old age? One by one 
lJeath took from him the friends of earlier days. Schil- 
r, with whom he had come to have the most sincere 
md honorable literary friendship, and who had called 
um, as he said, out of the charnel-house of science 
yack into the fair garden of life, died in 1805. “Goethe 
umself was ill at the time, and those who were about 
um refrained from telling him the news. Meyer, the 
utist, his intimate friend, who was with him, left the 
1ouse lest his grief might escape him. Goethe divined 
iomething of the fact, and said, at last, <I see Schiller 

ust be very ill.’” Says Lord Lytton, in his « Life of 
Schiller”: “That night they overheard Goethe—the 
€rene man, who seemed almost above human affection, 


vho disdained to reveal to others whatever grief he felt 
WW 


306 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 








when his son died—they overheard Goethe weep! I 
the morning he said to a friend, ‘Is it not true tha 
Schiller was very ill yesterday?’ The friend—it was, 
woman—sobbed. ‘He is dead,’ said Goethe faintly 
‘You have said it,’ was the answer. ‘He is dead!’ ré 
peated Goethe, and covered his face with his hands.” 

The Duchess Amalia died in 1807, his mother i 
1808, his wife in 1816. When his wife was taken fror 
him—the woman who with all her faults had pardone 
the long contumely he had heaped upon her, had ter 
derly nursed him through successive illnesses, and wh) 
had clung to him to the end in spite of his repeate: 
unfaithfulness—the outburst of his grief was terrible 
He knelt, we are told, by her deathbed, and seizing he 
hands said, ‘“ Thou wilt not forsake me; thou must no} 
forsake me!”’ The demigod after all was human, an 
was not sufficient to himself. 

Whether as the result of these losses or of his ows 
more mature reflection, there seems to have been in hij 
last days a little quickening of his moral sense and ¢ 
his desire for a life after death. He was inclined t) 
believe in immortality, “because nature wastes n 
power.” When Wieland died, Goethe consoled himse)) 
by thinking that a man so industrious would never ceas} 
to act, somewhere and in some way. In 1819, in repl. 
to a letter from Augusta von Stolberg, urging him t 
turn his mind to God, he wrote: 



















Let us go on, not caring too anxiously for the future. In ou 
Father's kingdom there are many provinces, and since he he 
given us here so fair a dwelling, he will doubtless take good cat) 
of us both in our future state of existence. There perhaps W 
shall understand each other better, and therefore shall love eac} 
other more. : 





~ 





EFFECT OF PANTHEISM UPON LITERARY WORK 507 


| ilo Zelter he wrote: 


~ Let us continue our work till one of us, before or after the 
ther, returns to ether at the summons of the World-Spirit. Then 
nay the Eternal not refuse us new activities analogous to those 
wherein we have here been tested! If he shall also add memory 
ind a continued sense of the Right and the Good, in his fatherly 
cindness, we shall then surely all the sooner take hold of the 
Waeels which drive the cosmic machinery— 


yr, as I suppose he means, enter upon the work of 
sternity. It is the principle of continuity to which he 
ppeals, together with the idea that man is made for 
abor, for accomplishment. Here is teleology. To 
azoethe work and happiness were inseparable. 

But he did not desire to work in solitude, either here 
w hereafter. Seven years after the death of his wife, 
ind when Goethe was seventy-four years of age, he 
‘onceived a passion for a young Bohemian lady, and 
vished to marry her. She wisely thought the differ- 
nce in their years to be too great, and he was saved 
Tom so hazardous a venture. Thackeray visited him 
n 1830, when Goethe was eighty-one, and found him 
till keen in intellect, and, though his hearing was de- 
€ctive, his eyesight was unimpaired. But at last the 
mdcame. In 1832, the old man of eighty-three was 
aken with a slight fever; his mind began to wander ; 
tis speech became incoherent ; he called for more light ; 
t last he settled himself in the corner of his armchair 
nd fell into a gentle sleep. No one knew at what pre- 
ise moment sleep became death. 

So a pantheistic philosophy produced a life of ever- 
ncreasing isolation and hopelessness. The benumbing 
f his moral sense and the taking of law into his own 


, 
| 


308 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


hands followed more and more upon his renunciation a 
a personal God. But I have still to examine the effects 
of this pantheistic philosophy upon Goethe's literary 
work. I must express my conviction that in this regar¢ 
also the result was a narrowing of his range of vision 
an impoverishment of hig emotions, and a barring 0 
the highest poetic achievement. | 

It is the judgment of all the competent critics, tha 
the most vigorous delineation of noble character, an 
the most stirring dramatic work of Goethe’s life, wa. 
the play that he first published, “Goetz von Berlichin 
gen.” In the figure of Goetz, the asserter of individua 
rights and the redresser of wrong, we have a heart-stir 
ring picture of the glory and romance of feudal times 
The drama pulsates with life from beginning to ené 
In it we have not only progressive action, but we hav. 
vivid contrast. Over against the generous daring of th 
hero, we have the'vacillation and perfidy of Weise 
and the Satanic arts of his temptress Adelaide. Th 
pangs of remorse are here, and the deepest elements 0 
tragedy. The love of liberty is appealed to so effec 
tively that we wonder what would have happened | 
Goethe had used his powers to rouse his countryme: 
against the French invader, and then wonder again hoy 
the youthful patriotic impulse of the author could eve 
have been so lost. In Goetz, our poet most nearly fo 
gets himself, throws his whole soul into his character: 
shows us great principles and passions contendin) 
together in personal form on the field of action. H 
has recreated the Middle Ages, with their barbari 
splendor and their wild independence. The first pul 
lished work of Walter Scott was a translation of thi 








LOST HIS POWER TO DEPICT REALITY 309 


‘drama of Goethe, and many have thought that ‘“ Goetz 
‘von Berlichingen”’ first suggested to Sir Walter the pos- 
ues of a literature of feudalism, and so the writing 
of the Waverley Novels. 

_ “Goetz” is Shakespearean in its variety, movement, 
and life ; indeed it was consciously the introduction 
into Germany of Shakespeare’s method and spirit, and 
the result was a breaking away from French literary 
fetters, and the creation of a new German literature. 
‘But “Goetz” was written before Goethe had come under 
‘the spell of Spinoza, and had still some belief *in free- 
dom, accountability, and guilt. From this time on, his 
sense of individuality grew weaker. The person be- 
‘came of less account than the idea; action seemed less 
valuable than thought. In all Goethe’s works we never 
have another whole-souled lover of his kind like Goetz ; 
we never have another self-condemning and self-tor- 
turing villain like Weislingen. The moral element 
gradually evaporates; persons give place to abstrac- 
tions; and abstractions finally become, as in the second 
part of ‘ Faust,’”’ mere unintelligible symbols. 

~ When Goethe broke away from God and from the 
moral law, he broke away from real life, and lost his 
power to depict reality. Not only did his patriotic sym- 
pathies give place to scorn for the aspirations of his 
country, but the highest sources of poetic inspiration 
were dried up. A long step away from truth was the 
publication of the “Sorrows of Werther.” They are 
the sorrows of a young man who falls in love with the 
wife of another, and who kills himself because he can- 
not possess her. It is a long piece of sickly sentimen- 
tality, so feverish and so maudlin as utterly to disgust 


SLO THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


the healthy-minded reader. What can be more ridiclll 
lous than the following : 


We went to the window. It still thundered in the distance; 
a soft rain was pouring down over the country and filled the air) 
around us with delicious odors. Charlotte leaned forward upon 
her arm ; her eyes wandered over the scene; she raised them to 
heaven, and then turned them upon me; they were moistened 
with tears ; she placed her hand upon mine, and said, ‘‘ Klop-} 
stock !’’ At once I remembered the magnificent ode which was| 
in her thoughts ; I felt oppressed with the weight of my sensa- 
tions, and sank under them. It was more than I could bear. J 
bent over her hand and kissed it in a stream of delicious tears.) 
As I raised myself, I looked steadfastly in her face. Divine 
Klopstock ! why didst thou not see thy apotheosis in those eyes?) 
And thy name, so often profaned, why should I ever desire to 
hear it repeated ? i 


And yet the ravings of this young idiot were read in| 
all classes of society, and were translated into many, 
foreign languages. ‘Perhaps there never was a fic 
tion,’’ says Lewes, “which so startled and enraptured| 
the world. Men of all kinds and classes were moved) 
by it. It was the companion of Napoleon in Egypt; 
it penetrated into China. To convey in a sentence ts 
wonderful popularity, we may state that in Germany it 
became a people’s book, printed on miserable paper, 
hawked about the streets like an ancient ballad, while, 
in the Chinese Empire, Charlotte and Werther were 
modeled in porcelain.”’ 

It was symptomatic of the time—a time of long-re 
pressed and therefore overwrought individual feeling. 
Goethe, with all his disposition to renounce foreign 
models, had been reading Rousseau, and the vain and 
impious Frenchman had encouraged the impulse of 








| 
| 
| 


| 


FROM (EREEDOM TO YCLASSIC. COLDNESS lit 


Goethe himself to open the floodgates of emotion, with- 


out regard to the restraints of reason or social order. 


And as ‘Goetz von Berlichingen ” had prepared the way 
for Walter Scott and the literature of feudalism, so the 
«Sorrows of Werther’’ prepared the way for Lord By- 


ron and the literature of romance. Byron regarded 


Goethe as the awakener of his genius, and “Childe 


'Harold”’ is an English adaptation of Werther, as Man- 
fred is an English adaptation of “Faust.” 


But thus far Goethe's work was of the Gothic type. 


With the higher social life of the court at Weimar, and 


especially with his journey to Italy, begins the second 
great period of his literary activity, when the Gothic 


gave place to the classical. Having infused life into 


German literature, he felt the need of giving it law and 


_ order, and all the more since his acknowledged position 
-as the greatest German poet now gave him the right 


and the confidence, as be expressed it, to “command 
poetry.” Poetry should be no less spontaneous, but its 
spontaneity should be in glad and natural subjection to 
the rules of right reason. These he found in classic 


lands and especially in Italy. To the south, with its 


sunny skies and its treasures of ancient art, he looked 


t 


ll 
} 


as to the poet’s paradise. This is the meaning of his 
lovely song, “ Kenust du das Land wo dte Citronen 
bliihen ?” 


Knowst thou the land where the fair citron blows, 
Where the bright orange midst the foliage glows, 
Where soft winds greet us from the azure skies, 
Where silent myrtles, stately laurels rise, 

Knowst thou it well? ’Tis there, ’tis there, 

That I, with thee, beloved one, would now repair ! 


| 
| 
o12 THE POET OF PANTHEISM | 


It is not Christian Italy, with its sanctuaries and! 
martyrs that he longed for, but pagan Italy rather, with 
its monuments of imperial greatness and its mastell 
pieces of painting and sculpture. The cloudy skies of, 
the North oppressed him; he sought light and freedom, 
It is too evident that moral and not simply artistic free- 
dom was the goal he had in view. He scarcely ever; 
visited the churches, and the history of the church he 
took little interest in. Dante he had no taste for; he 
thought the “Inferno” abominable, the “ Purgatorio”. 
dubious, and the “ Paradiso” tiresome. It was the calm, 
superiority of Greek art to conscience and to moragl 
that constituted to him its attraction. | 

Beauty was the one expression of the Infinite in 
which he believed, and beauty he would worship even, 
at the sacrifice of goodness and of truth. Yet he per- 
suaded himself that this worship was normal and) 
worthy. There was in it a grain of sense. Religion) 
has too often ignored the beautiful. Truth has often: 
failed of acceptance because the substance has been so} 
belied by the form. Goethe wished to unite the two, 
And this is the meaning of the mystical marriage, in) 
the second part of his great drama, between Faust. 
and Helen of Greece. It is the marriage of sub- 
stance and form, of truth and beauty, of Northern life 
and fire with Southern order and law. | 

The works of this period are in point of artistic fin- 
ish and completeness the noblest of Goethe’s life.) 
The ordering of material, the exclusion of the irrele- 
vant, the dignity of the thought, the melody of the 
phrase, show the hand of amaster. “Tasso” and “ Iphi- 
genia’’ are sculpturally perfect. One might almost 














| FROM FREEDOM TO CLASSIC COLDNESS ae 
‘think them written and acted in ancient Greece, so full 
are they of the spirit of classic poetry and art. While 
‘the play of feeling in them shows us that the motive 
and idea are modern, the form is statuesque and the ef- 
fect is that of cold regularity. We long for greater 
‘warmth, even at the expense of beauty. With the pa- 
‘gan indifference to moral ideas, there is also a deaden- 
ing of the emotions and a consequent weakening of in- 
‘terest. The operation of conscience is the very essence 
of tragedy. No other fear thrills the reader or specta- 
‘tor as does the fear of retribution. Pity and remorse 
and repentance touch deeper chords in the heart than 
de any representations of love or joy. But these deeper 
chords Goethe found it increasingly hard to reach. 
The proud serenity of the man disdained itself to 
feel, and it could not make others feel, the real emotions 
that make human life solemn and momentous. More 
and more, as the mood of Goethe became that of the 
pagan gods, a mood of cheerful optimism and of moral 
indifference, his works became icily regular and fault- 
ily faultless, but the life had gone out of them. The 
wonderful song of the Fates in “Iphigenia,” the trans- 
‘ation of which I quote from the Reverend N. L. Froth- 
ingham, expresses his whole conception of deity and his 
‘whole philosophy of life: 
Within my ear there rings that ancient song, — 
Forgotten was it and forgotten gladly, — 

Song of the Parcee, which they shuddering sang 
When from his golden seat fell Tantalus. 
They suffered in his wrongs ; their bosom boiled 
Within them, and their song was terrible. 
To me and to my sister in our youth 
The nurse would sing it, and I marked it well. 


314 


THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


«©The gods be your terror 
Ye children of men ; 
They hold the dominion 
In hands everlasting, 
All free to exert it 
As listeth their will. 


ac 


‘«Let him fear them doubly 
Whom e’er they’ ve exalted ! 
On crags and on cloud-piles 
The seats are made ready 
Around the gold tables. 


‘« Dissension arises : 
Then tumble the feasters 
Reviled and dishonored 
To gulfs of deep midnight ; 
And look ever vainly 
In fetters of darkness 
For judgment that’s just. 


‘«But they remain seated 
At feasts never failing 
Around the gold tables. 
They stride at a footstep 


From mountain to mountain ; 


Through jaws of abysses 


Steams toward them the breathing 


Of suffocate Titans, 
Like offerings of incense 
A light-rising vapor. 


‘«They turn, the proud masters, 


From whole generations 
The eye of their blessing ; 
Nor will in the children 
The once well-beloved 
Still eloquent features 

Of ancestor see,’’ 





a 


e . 
ee 


Sainanedilicnesenadiiciiansnmetaetame san 


a 





| THE FIRST PART OF FAUST 315 


So sang the dark sisters. 
The old exile heareth 
That terrible music 

In caverns of darkness, 
Remembereth his children 
| And shaketh his head. 


There had been a Shakespearean period in Goethe’s 
work, a period of fresh original genius; this had been 
followed by the classical period, in which form was the 
great aim of the poet; there was still to come the Ro- 
mantic period, in which he sought to combine the merits 
of the other two. “ Faust” was the great work of this 
period, as indeed it was the crowning work of his’ life, 
and the greatest production of the century in the Ger- 
man language. But it is so, not because it is the work 
of the author’s age, but because it preserves to us the 
best impulses of the author’s youth. As the poet him- 
self has said, the conception of it came to him as early 
as the year 1774, when he was twenty-five years old. 
Considerable portions of the first part were printed in 
1790, but the first part was complete only in 1808, and 
the second part belongs to the poet’s last days in 1831, 
after he had meditated upon it for more than fifty years. 

The story of “Faust” had the great advantage of 
being already a popular one, with elements of the deep- 
est interest derived from still lingering beliefs in magic, 
evil spirits, and the possibility of a fatal confederacy of 
‘man with the Prince of Darkness. Here was a frame- 
work in which Goethe’s abstract ideas might fix them- 
selves—ideas which in his mind were ever tending to an . 
impotent generality. The theme was nothing less than 
that of Dante and of Milton: man’s fall and man’s re- 


i 


316 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


covery. Much as Goethe disliked Dante, our poet de 
scribed the purpose of his great drama somewhat a: 
Dante would have described the purpose of the “ Divine 
Comedy”; he declared it to be the progress of the 
human soul through the world to hell, and then agair 
through the world to heaven. 

As in the case of Dante, so in the case of Goethe 
the personal experiences of the poet are interwover 
with the story. Indeed, both Faust and Mephistopheles 
are only impersonations of the two contending princi 
ples in the breast of Goethe himself. In 1781 he wrote 
to Lavater: “I am conscious of the fact you so wel! 
describe, that God and Satan, heaven and hell, are 
striving for the mastery within me.” And Faust only 
echoes Goethe’s own experience when he says : 





Two souls are ever striving in my breast 
Each from the other longing to be free. 
) 


But neither to us nor to the world at large does 
the interest of the work depend upon its representatior 
of purely personal struggle and achievement. We are 
moved by it because it presents to us a most vivid pic 
ture of universal human experience, sets before us the 
moral struggle of the ages, reflects our own life with 
its temptation and danger, promises to throw light upor 
the great problem of sin and redemption. 


“ Faust’ is great—one of the greatest poems of the 


world—because the first part embodies sublime truths, 
of human freedom, sin, guilt, retribution, from whick 
Goethe in his earlier life had not yet falsely emanci 
pated himself. The cynical and lascivious Satan, whe 
can assume the garb and air of a gentleman when he 





| 
| 
| TRUTHS OF FREEDOM, SIN, AND GUILT 317 
entices to transgression, but who throws off disguise 
when once he has bound his victim fast, is a true crea- 
tion of Goethe’s genius. The restlessness of. a selfish 
spirit, the impossibility of satisfying its longings with 
the things of sense, the ever-increasing complications 
of shame and misery in which the sinner involves him- 
self, the ruin which all unconsciously he spreads around 
him, have never been portrayed more powerfully than 
Hmethe first part of “ Faust.” 

Margaret is the picture of a guileless child led astray 
by the arts of the tempter; her love is made the 
means of her destruction; her sin brings death to her 
mother, her brother, her child. In the great cathedral, 
where she goes to pray, the consciousness of guilt 
chokes back her prayer, and she falls fainting as she 
hears the solemn reverberations of the “Dzes Jr@.” 
In prison, when Faust comes to rescue her, she is found 
wild with insanity and rejecting all entreaties to escape, 
while Faust himself, torn with remorse and anguish, is 
forced by his chuckling demon to leave her to her fate. 
There is no more pitiful story anywhere than this, and 
Goethe has told it with a vividness and terseness that 
are worthy of all praise. Here he has drawn his char- 
acters from real life, and has been true to the facts of 
human nature. The first part of ‘Faust’? must be 
ranked with “ Goetz,” as a survival of insight, the price- 
less relic of an early manhood as yet uncorrupted by 
‘false philosophy. While in form it shows the influence 
‘of Goethe’s classical studies, it has preserved the fresh- 
ness and spontaneity of his Shakespearean youth ; and 
it will doubtless hold its place as one of the world’s 
-master-works in the realm of poetry. 


318 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


It is comparatively easy to tell the story of sin and| 
degradation. Not only the descent to Avernus, but, 
the description of it, can be compassed by a genius un- 
illuminated by Divine revelation. But the return from 
hell is difficult, and is equally difficult to describe. It 
is plain that unity and completeness required an account, 
of Faust’s restoration, just as Milton’s “ Paradise Lost” 
required for its complement the “Paradise Regained.” 
It is no wonder that the pantheistic poet found the sec- 
ond part of “Faust” a long and arduous task. He 
was to show, what no mortal wisdom apart from special) 
revelation can ever show, how a human soul exposed to 
the penalties of violated law, and in addition inwardly 
defiled, can be restored to favor with God and made like 
God in character. 

To this mystery he had thrown away the key when) 
he gave up his belief in a personal God. From the im- 
personal God of pantheism there could be no reaching 
down in sympathy, no atonement for sin, no declaration 





of pardon, no inward transformation of the affections, 
no help in the way of virtue. Man must accomplish| 
his own renewal. As he has bound himself to his lower 
nature, so he must liberate himself from it. And this. 
he can do, first, by self-culture, and secondly, by labor for. 
the good of others. Self-culture is typified by Faust’s | 
marriage with Helen of Greece, the symbol of Beauty, | 
and labor for the good of others is typified by Faust’s 
reclaiming of the barren seashore and providing for . 
happiness of its coming inhabitants. When, in his old 
age, though blind, he realizes that others will be bene-) 
fited by his work, he finds a moment of true happiness) 
and dies with these words upon his lips: 








| THE SECOND PART OF’ FAUST 31g 


Freedom like life must be deserved by toil; 
Here men shall live, and on this fertile soil, 
Begirt with dangers, shall from youth to age 
Their constant warfare with the ocean wage. © 
Oh, could I see my followers! Might I stand 
- Among free people on my once free land ! 
| To such a moment of intense delight 
I’d fearless say : ‘‘O stay, thou art so bright !”’ 
Anticipating all that future bliss, 
I have itnow. That moment's here! ’ Tis this! 


And this is Faust’s redemption. Mephistopheles is 
outwitted. The bargain had been that whenever Faust 
should say to the passing moment, “ Stay! thou art 
so fair!” his soul should thenceforth belong to the Evil 
One. Satan therefore claims his prey. But angelic 
hosts appear to claim the soul of Faust for their own— 
only the body is left to the devil. And these heavenly 
messengers, as they bear his immortal part away, give 
the reason for this defeat of the adversary and this 
rescue of his victim: 


The noble spirit now is free 
And saved from evil scheming ; 
Whoe'er aspires unweariedly 
Is not beyond redeeming. 
And if he feels the grace of love 
That from on high is given, 
The blessed hosts that wait above 
Shall welcome him to heaven. 


«In these lines,” said Goethe to Eckermann, “the 
key to Faust’s rescue may be found—in Faust himself 
an ever purer and higher form of activity to the end, 
and the Eternal Love coming down to his aid from 


320 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


above. This is entirely in harmony with our religiotil 
ideas, according to which we are saved not alone 
through our own strength, but through the freely 
bestowed grace of God.” Goethe had a habit of put 
ting his thoughts into Christian language, while the 
substance of them was wholly pantheistic and pagan. 
And though the second part of “Faust”’ has often 
been quoted as indicating its author’s final approxima-| 
tion to evangelical beliefs, a careful examination of his 
writings shows that his meaning is by no means the 
Christian meaning even in his closing words: 


All things transitory 
But as symbols are sent : 
Earth’ s insufficiency | 
Here grows to event ; 
The Indescribable 
Here it is done ; 
The Woman-soul leadeth us 
Upward and on. 





] 


The “Woman-soul”—das Ewig-weibliche—is the 
pantheistic substitute for the personal Love of God in 
Jesus Christ. But it has no Christian significance. 
The God to whom Goethe would lead us is only the 
Brocken-shadow of humanity itself, projected upon the 
clouds by the imagination. ‘ Christ,” he says, “ con: 
ceived of an only God, to whom he attributed all the 

qualities which he felt in himself as perfections. God 
became simply the essence of his own beautiful soul, 
full of goodness and love like himself, and entirely adap. 
ted to have good men confidingly give themselves up t¢ 
him and cherish this idea as the sweetest bond witk 
heaven.” This ideal of humanity is not only the only 





| 

| 

} CONCESSIONS ONLY APPARENT ant 

God, but it is the only Christ, for Goethe says also : 

«Your Christ has awakened my wonder and admiration. 
. In him you can now see yourself as in a mirror, 

and in fact can thus worship yourself.” 

_ This ideal of humanity is not confined to Christ, it is 


more or less embodied in all men. He says: 


We are not the disciples of one master ; we have many teach- 
ers. We regard ourselves as all sons of God, and worship 
him as existing in ourselves and in all his children. . . My 
views are not anti-Christian or un-Christian, they are simply non- 
Christian. . . You think nothing is so beautiful as the gospel. 
But among all the books, ancient and modern, written by men to 
whom God has given wisdom, I find thousands of pages as 
beautiful, as useful, as indispensable for the instruction of man- 
kind. . . Were I a preacher, you would find me as zealous in 
defending my notion of an aristocracy as you are now in asserting 
your idea of Christ’s monarchy. 


Every man may have God revealed in him just as Christ 
had. “What greater gain can man find in life than this, 
that the one principle which is both God and Nature 
should reveal itself to him?” 


Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewtnnen 
Als dass thm Gott-Natur sich offenbare ? 


_ Yet he cannot conceive of any higher or more per- 
fect revelation of his impersonal God—which is simply 
ideal humanity—than that which is found in Christ. 
“The third religion and the last,” he says in “ Wilhelm 
Meister’s Wanderjahre,” “is Christianity.” Men have 
been led up by Christ to an ideal that could not have 
been believed possible without his aid. 


To leave beneath his feet all the shows and honors of this world, 
V 


322 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


and to keep ever in view heaven, his birthplace and home, might| 
seem possible in a wise and good man ; but to endure the utmost 
sorrow, nay more, to find means of a divine manifestation in his: 
endurance of humiliation, poverty, contempt, torture, and death; 
to lift up the vilest out of their sins and miseries ; to make them 
capable of loving holiness, yea, capable of attaining holiness— 
these are facts of which only faint indications had appeared before 
the time of his coming to dwell with men. And such a coming 
cannot be temporary, cannot pass away as a fact merely historical. 
Since human nature has been elevated to a point so high, and 
has been made capable of rising to such a height, it remains for- 
ever as a point from which humanity cannot recede. . . The 
truth that has thus been made manifest has been incorporated, 
and can never disappear. . . Humanity cannot take a retrograde 
step, and the truth that has once found a divine embodiment can 
never again be dissolved. . . The Christian religion has strength 
in itself. From age to age that strength has been exerted to lifi 
up fallen and suffering humanity. With such facts on its side if 
cannot require the aid of philosophy, but must hold an independ. 
ent and sublime position—one far above all philosophy. | 











The central idea of Christianity is that of the cuferifl 
Saviour. Carlyle says that he learned from Goethe te 
seek, not happiness, but the Cross of Christ. Anc¢ 
Goethe himself said: ‘The Christian religion, ofter, 
enough dismembered and scattered here and there, must 
at last be found collected and restored to union by the 
Cross.” And he counsels us, in founding our future 
society, to make Christianity a principal element in its 
religion. 

Here is a would-be heathen compelled, in spite of him 
self, to take account of Christianity, yet utterly miscon: 
ceiving its meaning and value. The fundamental dif, 
ficulty is in his erroneous conception of God. His 
God is not the God of holiness, personal and free 








| 
| 


| GOD INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM NATURE 323 


‘reflected i in the human conscience and demanding obedi- 
ence to moral law, but rather a universal force indis- 
‘tinguishable from nature. Neither God nor man has 
freedom, and man is but the link in an endless chain of 
lmecessity, a victim of circumstance. The moral impulse 
is only one of many impulses, all of which equally pro- 
ceed from this Nature-God. The reproaches of con- 
science and the threats of retribution are alike illusions 
to which the wise man becomes superior. To follow 
one’s bent, to develop all one’s powers, to do the great- 
est amount of work, to secure the greatest amount of 
enjoyment—in short, to make the most of one’s self 
and of one’s opportunities—this is man’s calling on 
earth. 

There is no such thing as sin or guilt, for there is no 
freedom to abuse, and no moral law to be violated. 
There need be no repentance theretore. All that is 
needed is self-development, choice of the highest, labor 
for others. Faust is admitted into heaven without so 
much as a pang of repentance or a word of confession, 
though his life has been stained by lust and treachery 
and murder. As there is no God against whom he has 
sinned, so he needs no atonement for his sin. The cul- 
ture and development which he needs are quite within 
his own power. He can whiten his own black heart. 
The leopard can put away his spots, and the Ethiopian 
an change his skin. In place of the Spirit of God we 
ind at most a nature-power, which is nothing more 
chan the man himself. Superstitious faith in a certain 
lemonic energy takes the place of dependence upon 
God, and the fact that man is possessed by this demonic 
-nergy excuses and even glorifies every passion however 


324 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


vicious. Redemption is to be attained, not by the culti- | 
vation of character, but by the cultivation of impulse, | 
The second part of “Faust” preaches the pantheistic 
gospel of salvation by mere natural development. Evil 
in time becomes good, and man saves himself. | 
So much for the substance of Goethe’s greatest 
work. Is the second part of “Faust” as inferior to the | 
first part in form? Here all the critics and commen- 
tators are well-nigh agreed. The second part is one of 
the puzzles of literature. While the general drift of it 
is comprehensible and there are isolated passages of, 
great power and beauty, we must declare that with 
increasing age the poet’s hold upon reality grew weaker | 
and weaker. It is a world of mere fancy into which he 
bears us. Not only is all verisimilitude left behind, but, 
all intelligibleness also. A host of symbolic creatures 
move and talk, but it is a long process of wearisome, 
_mystification, the inanity of which only the poet's lack 
of humor could have prevented him from recognizing, 
It is not only unintelligible and unreal, but it is also) 
cold. The warmth of life, which pulsated so strongly 
in Goetz and in the first part of “ Faust,” has gone out 
of it. The atmosphere of necessity encircles it. The 
sun that shines is that of winter. | 
The drama is purely intellectual. It is like the aged 
Goethe himself, on whose lily-white hand no vein. 
showed the way to the heart. A pretended wisdom 
amuses itself by writing for us hieroglyphics, which, 
when we succeed in translating them, seem intended for 
the very purpose of concealing the poverty of the 
thought. As the old man, in his study at Weimar, dis 
posed the lights in such a way as to make the most) 

















>) 


THE POET OF A MATERIALISTIC AGE 325 


t 


effective impression upon his visitors, so in the second 
part of “Faust”’ Goethe seems to play the oracle simply 
for the purpose of imposing on the credulous: He was 
| accustomed to be worshiped, and he had the art to make 
that worship posthumous by a work of apocalyptic 
‘obscurity. In form as well as in substance, we must 
hold the second part of “Faust” to be the most strik- 
ing of judgments upon the philosophy which it seeks to 
express. The tree is known by its fruits, and we have 
‘in Goethe the proof that pantheism not only depraves 
‘the poet’s life, but withers the poet’s art. 

Thus I have tried to show the effect of a wrong 
‘moral decision upon Goethe's philosophy, and the effect 
of that philosophy in turn upon his morality and upon 
his poetry. It has been a painful task, and I have 
undertaken it only because the Goethe-cult which has 
been rife both in Germany and in America has in it 
such promise and potency of evil. Carlyle and George 
Eliot are the English representatives of this Goethean 
‘school. The Concord School of Philosophy has devoted 
awhole summer to his glorification. It must be that 
much of truth and of beauty is to be found in his writ- 
‘ings, or this systematic panegyric would hardly be 
possible. 

_ What then is the great merit of Goethe, and how can 
'we account for his hold upon the thought of our time? 
. answer that Goethe is in many ways even yet the best 
exponent of the thought of our time, with its lawless 
independence, its new knowledge of nature, its confi- 
dence in material things, its love of merely sensuous 
|beauty, its aversion to pain and self-denial, its belief 
that the evils of the world can be cured by physical 


i) 


326 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


means without the forgiveness of sins or the regener- 
ating grace of God. 

It was Goethe’s merit or demerit that he put all this 
doctrine into attractive form. With a wonderfully clear 
and serene mind, he learned from French masters to 
write for the first time a German that was no longer 
crabbed, but simple and musical as Apollo’s lute. His 
prose has a sweetness and at the same time an intensity 
that of itself goes far to persuade the reader of the 
importance and truth of what he reads, and his poetry 


has in it that sustained dignity and precision, that | 


masterful vigor and repose, which we call “the large 
style.’ This was unknown to the German tongue 
before Goethe’s time. Thus he used French means to 


conquer French traditions and to create a new German 


literature. ‘ 
He was one of the very greatest literary artists that 
the world has seen ; only Virgil and Milton in this mat- 
ter of form can be called his superiors. He had a 
deep and sympathetic feeling for the life of nature 
which might have surpassed that of Wordsworth, if he 
had only been able with Wordsworth to break from 
necessitarian and pantheistic fetters and to see in rock 
and mountain, in the leaves of the trees and the clouds 
of the sky, the presence and utterance of a personal 
God. As Saul’s companions on the way to Damascus 
heard the voice from heaven but saw no man, so Goethe 
heard the voice in nature but did not recognize the per- 
son; he perceived the moving panorama to be instinct 
with life, but he could not discern in it all the living 


God. So his imagination has been called a passive | 
imagination ; it was not in the truest sense active or 








IN HIS LYRICS’ HE FORGETS HIMSELF Sf 


creative ; it simply gave back what the senses had given 
to it; there was no true interpretation by the spirit. 
But as a mere reproduction of nature his verse is almost 
unequaled. Hutton has well said that his lyrics seem 
to escape as unconsciously from the essence of earth 
and air, as the scent from a violet or the music from a 
bird. 

It is in his lyrics indeed that Goethe most nearly for-. 
gets himself. Goetz and Faust are his great characters, 
and in these early works he has put the fervor and 
freshness of his genius. But because of his necessi- 
tarian views he was able to understand physical nature 
more fully than he could understand human nature, 
The kinship between man and the outward world, our 
brotherhood with the universe, this he saw and expressed 
in song. Here abstractions are absent ; the poet throws 
himself into the feeling of the moment ;-there is a flash 
of insight and a flood of sympathy that carry him away, 
and when he puts them into verse, they carry us away 
likewise. What, for example, can be more beautiful 
than this little night-song: 


Hush’d on the hill 
Is the breeze ; 
Scarce by the zephyr 
The trees 
Softly are pressed ; 
The woodbird’s asleep on the bough ; 
Wait then, and thou 
Soon wilt find rest ! 


I am inclined to believe that Goethe’s songs are more 


_ genuine and lasting proofs of poetic genius than any of 


) 
\ 


his dramas or any of his works in prose. He has said 


328 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


that a work of art can be comprehended by the head 
only with the assistance of the heart, and nothing can 
be more pertinent or: true. But I would add that a 
work of art can be produced by the head only with the 
assistance of the heart. It is because Goethe's heart 
was put into his lyrics that they are immortal. Yet) 
even these degenerated as he grew older, and for the 
plain reason that his heart grew selfish and cold. His 
Olympian serenity was also Olympian isolation, His. 
calm avoidance of all that would disturb, his ignoring of | 
human sin, his effort to lift himself above all sorrow, 
constituted a limitation of his genius, narrowed its. 








range, dried up its springs of emotion. As he cut him-| 
self loose from moral restraint and suffered passion) 








to have its way with him, a chill came over his soul; 
poetic inspiration gave place to poetic artifice; his later 
lyrics, like the second part of “ Faust,’ are didactic 
and abstract; the poet, in trying to save his life, has 
lost it. 

Herder, the critic, the preacher, and the Christian, 
who watched with sadness and growing repulsion the) 
downward progress of Goethe’s mind and art, said well, | 
“Would that Goethe could take up some other Latin 
book besides Spinoza!” We see the evil that can be, 
wrought by a false philosophy. Much of the modern 
notion, so popular in fiction, that love is a passion which 
knows no law, which reason and will cannot control, and 
which justifies” any means taken for its gratification, is 
directly or indirectly the result of the teaching of 
Goethe. He has done much to spread about immoral 
desire a glamour of refinement, and to abate the blame’ 
of transgression by charging it tonature. Hehas made 








THE ENSLAVER QF HIS COUNTRY 329 


moral and esthetic culture a substitute for religion, and 
_has substituted self-deveiopment for the service of God. 


I do not deny that in doing this he has incidentally 


called attention to human impulses and needs which the 


current Christianity of his time too much neglected. 
The Puritan turned from the moss-rosebud saying, “I 
have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.” But 
nature is beautiful notwithstanding. Art has its claims, 
and we are bound to have a proper regard for self. 
While Goethe moves in the sphere of the merely 
gesthetic and worldly, he has surprising insight and wis- 
dom ; whole books of proverbs and maxims for the con- 


duct of life have been drawn from his writings. He 


has been called the wisest man that ever lived without 
a conscience, without humility, and without faith. But 
his. wisdom is simply the wisdom of this world that is 
foolishness with God, and that is foolishness likewise to 
any man who looks beneath the surface and who sees 
its results in Goethe’s character and in Goethe’s literary 
work. He himself said that his writings were one con- 
tinued confession. We must also say that his writings 
are one continuous judgment and condemnation of his 
philosophy and his life. 

Goethe desired, above all other honors, that he might 


be called by the name of Befrezer, or Liberator. In 


one sense he merits the title; he has freed his country 
from its bondage to French literary models, and has 
Opened the way for a native German literature. Be- 
liever in necessity, as he was, and resigning himself to 
whatever force was uppermost, he could not be a patriot. 
And yet, like Dante, by uniting his country in a liter- 


ary bond, he indirectly and unintentionally prepared his 


330 THE POET OF PANTHEISM 


country for political unity. Hermann Grimm tells us in 
fact that a politically united Germany was made possible | 
only by Goethe and Schiller. While we grant, however, 
that Goethe may be called directly the literary liberator, - 
and indirectly the political liberator, of Germany, I must 
record my conviction that in other and more important 
respects he was the enslaver of his country. I believe | 
that the materialistic tendency which has been felt | 
throughout the century in Germany, and which has 
almost superseded the older idealistic and spiritualistic | 
teaching of the universities, is in large part due to the | 
influence of Goethe. 

Multitudes of youth have been captivated by his sen- 
suous and fatalistic spirit. How vast a power the great- | 
est writer of a nation can exert, was never more strik- | 
ingly illustrated than in the case of Goethe. Sad to | 
say, he has not used that power, as Shakespeare did, 
to depict the actual facts of human nature—he has | 
used it rather to set before us a humanity devoid of | 
conscience and freedom, and the helpless prey to what- 
ever demonic impulse may arise within. He has not 
used that power, as Milton did, to impress upon men’s | 
minds the central truths of the Christian scheme, man’s | 
willful abuse of freedom, his fall into sin and guilt and | 
misery, his recovery by the reaching down of infinite | 
divine grace—he has used it rather to weaken human | 
faith in divine revelation and in the one and only means : 
of man’s restoration. | 

To bring a whole nation, and to some extent a whole 
world, into the toils and under the bonds of a pantheistic 
philosophy that knows no personal God, no freedom of | 
will, no real responsibility for sin, no way of pardon | 











ee 





THE ENSLAVER (OF HIS :_COUNTRY 331 


and renewal, no certain hope of immortal life, is to be 
the agent of a moral and spiritual enslavement worse 
by far than any enslavement that is merely physical or 


political, because it is enslavement of the soul to false- 


hood and wickedness, and sure in due time to bring 
physical and political enslavement in its train. Over 


the door of the house where Goethe was born was 
carved a lyre andastar. He loved to think it a prog- 


\nostication of his greatness as a poet. But the star 
| was 


A star that with the choral starry dance 
Joined not, but stood, and standing saw 

The hollow orb of moving Circumstance 
Rolled round by dne fixed law. 


And Tennyson is not too severe when he intimates that 
this abuse of intellectual power and this self-exaltation 
above truth and duty are signs not of human, but of 


‘diabolic greatness. It is Goethe whom he calls 





A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain, 
That did love Beauty only, or, if Good, 
Good only for its beauty. 





~ WORDSWORTH 











WORDSWORTH | 


THE POET OF NATURE 


MATTHEW ARNOLD has well said that Wordsworth is 
one of the chief glories of English poetry, and he adds 
_ that by nothing is England so glorious as by her poetry. 
When we think of what England has done for liberty 
and for religion, it may seem at first thought extrava- 
gant to call her greatest gift to the world the gift of 
poetry. But it is her poetry, in which England’s lib- 
erty and religion are best expressed. Matthew Arnold 
himself suggests the point of view from which his 
words can be interpreted, when he says that “ poetry 
is the most perfect speech of man, that in which he 
comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.” 

I wish to compare with this a passage from John 
Stuart Mill. The philosopher and economist, in a 
time of great mental depression, sought relief in the 
reading of poetry. He read Byron, but he found his 
Own evnuz and discontent only reflected to him. He 
turned to Wordsworth. There he found medicine for 
his state of mind, because Wordsworth’s poems fur- 
nished the culture of the emotions which he was in 
quest of. They awakened not only the love of rural 
beauty but a greatly increased interest in the common 
destiny of human beings. 

‘©The result was,’’ said Mr. Mili, ‘that I gradually, but com- 
pletely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never 

335 


od 


330 THE POET OF NATURE 


again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth, less 
according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he 
had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be 
said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and 
contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those 
which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth 
is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far 
more poets than he.’’ | 


The characterization of Wordsworth as “the poet of 
unpoetical natures” is itself a stroke of genius; and, 
by combining the thought of it with Arnold’s dictum 
about poetry, we may get a new understanding of Words. 
worth’s exact place in literature. Our poet was primar. 
ily a seeker after truth. But he did not regard truth 
as consisting solely or mainly in mere facts, or in mere 
abstract propositions. To him truth was reality, the 
inner lite of things. The.world of nature and of man 
expressed not only thought but feeling, and this thought 
and feeling was the thought and feeling of a Being 
greater than the world, because he was the Maker anc! 
the Life of the world. The macrocosm could be inter, 
preted by the microcosm, for macrocosm and microcosm 
alike were modes in which the Infinite One made him 
self known to us. It is the great and unique merit 0; 
Wordsworth that he first used the common, unsophisti 
cated, primary, and universal sympathies of humanity 
to interpret the physical universe in which humanity 
has its dwelling-place. He is the poet of nature, be 
cause he perceives the kinship between nature and mat. 
by reason of their common origin and life in God. | 

There was need enough of such poetry as this, fo; 
the thought of the world had for many a day tended tc 
sunder nature from God, and so to sunder nature from 

















me 
en Eee 


HIS RELATION TO PRECEDING THOUGHT 537; 


man. The Hebrews saw God in nature. They said, 
“The God of glory thundereth,’ and “The heavens 


‘declare the glory of God.’ Our Lord declared that 


God fed the birds, and clothed the grass of the field 
with beauty. Paul and John recognized the presence of 
God in his works. As all men “live, move, and have 


their being” in God, so all things “consist” or hold to- 


gether in Christ, the one great Revealer of God; 
“whatever has come into being was life in him.” The 
Eastern Church in general held more strongly to this 
conception of God’s immanence than did the Western ; 
Augustine and Calvin unduly emphasized the forensic 
element, and made God’s operation more a matter of 
faw than of life. So Puritan theology led by natural 
reaction to deism, with its distant God and its automatic 
universe. Upton has said: 


© The defect of deism is that on the human side it treats all 


men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine 
nature that interrelates them and in a measure unifies them, and 
that on the divine side it separates man from God and makes the 
relation between them a purely external one.! 


On this view, man loses his dignity, and the sympa- 
thies and aspirations which men have in common cease 
to be matters of interest or concern. But nature fol- 
lows the fate of man. It becomes a curious machine, 
Whose mathematics may be studied, but whose life and 
glory have departed. A universe which can get on 
without God has no longer anything which irresistibly 
attracts the mind of man. There is no affinity between 
Man and nature; nature has no voice with which to stir 
man’s heart ; nature indeed is dead. 


Se 





Hes Flibbert Lectures,” 287. 
W 


338 THE POET OF NATURE 


These were the influences which had come to reign 
in English literature before Wordsworth began his 
work. A formal and mechanical versifying had taken 
the place of the Elizabethan vigor and insight. Pope 
showed what talent could do without genius, what meré 
taste could do without a lofty faith. But a new breath 
of life swept over the world. The French Revolution 
was the sign of it in politics; the transcendental schoo| 
of Kant and Fichte and Schelling was the sign of it ir 
philosophy ; Burns, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Words. 
worth, were signs of it in English literature. The great 
est of these poets was Wordsworth. He was greates! 
because he, most distinctly of all poets up to his time 
apprehended the principle of all true poetry and mos. 
consistently and continuously applied it to the descriptio1 
of nature and of man. Henry Crabb Robinson state 
the principle, when he says that “by the imagination 
the mere fact is connected with that Infinity withou) 
which there is no poetry.” Wordsworth regarded it a: 
his sacred mission to show that the world is full o| 
beauty and meaning because it is throbbing with th: 
life of God. Nothing is insignificant or valueless, fo: 
each thing manifests the “Wisdom and Spirit of th, 
universe.” “Amongst least things he had an under 
sense of the greatest.’ We see in him the true bic 
logical impulse which since his day has transforme) 
science as well as literature, and Emerson only e 
pressed Wordsworth’s leading thought, when. he wrot¢ 





In the mud and scum of things 
Something always, always sings. 


It is fortunate that we have in “The Prelude”’ th 





ef 


a 


A 
ie 
ah 


7 





> 


o- 


 poet’s account of the growth of his own mind. For 
frank unfolding of the innermost experiences of a great 
man and a great writer, it holds much the same place in 
literature as that which is held in philosophy by Des- 


cartes’ “Treatise on Method,” and in theology by the 





MEDITATION UPON NATURE 339 


“Confessions” of Augustine. “The Prelude” isa poem 
of nine thousand lines, yet it is intended only as a sort 

of ante-chapel to a great cathedral upon which Words- 
worth intended to spend the main labor of his life, and 
to which his minor poems were to sustain the relation 


for niches, chantries, oratories, and altars. ‘The Ex- 
‘cursion,” nearly eleven thousand lines in length, was the 
| only part of the great structure which the poet actually 
‘completed. It was meant to be the second book of the 
poem, “The Recluse,” of which only fragments were 
_written, was to be the first book. The third book never 


_ €xisted except in Wordsworth’s imagination. In many 


ways “ The Prelude,” though long and occasionally pro- 


Saic, is an invaluable record. The poet has there dis- 


Closed himself more perfectly than Dante or Milton 
ever did. As we read, we see a vigorous and healthy, 


yet a calm and quiet spirit developing under our eyes, 


even though we fail to see the justice of Coleridge’s 


praise when he described the poem as 


An Orphic song, indeed, 
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts, 
To their own music chanted. 


A peasant near Rydal was asked during the poet’s 
lifetime: «What sort of a man is Mr. Wordsworth?” 


and the reply was: “Oh, sir, he goes humming and 
muffling and talking to himself; but zw/z/es he’s as sen- 


340 THE POET OF NATURE 


sible as you or me!” In this matter of meditation up- 
on nature, the child was father of the man. From his 
earliest youth he ranged the open heights, rowed upon 
the lake, angled in lonely brooks, or “alone upon some 
jutting eminence” watched for the gleams of dawn. 
So he tells us “the foundations of his mind were laid.” | 
At first he passively received, passively enjoyed. But. 
at length he became conscious that ‘a plastic power 
‘a local spirit of his own, at war) 


”’ 


abode within him, 
with general tendency.” The creative impulse began 
to awaken: | 

An auxiliar light, 


Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
Bestowed new splendor. 


But even this creation was reproduction, for he was 





able to create only because of the pre-existing harmony 
between man and nature. ‘He began to construe the 
universal life as quasi-human,” says Professor Knight, 
his biographer. ‘Delight in nature for herself was ex- 
changed for delight in nature for what she revealed of 
man. The process of idealization, or rather, of inter- 
pretation, was matured, only when he detached himself 
from nature and realized the separateness and the kin- 
dredness together.” : 





As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, 

I looked for universal things, perused 

The common countenance of earth and sky ; 

Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace 

Of that first paradise whence man was driven ; 

And sky, whose beauty and whose bounty are expressed 
By the proud name she bears—the name of heaven. 

I called on both to teach me what they might ; 





HE SOUGHT TRUTH MORE THAN BEAUTY 341 


Or turning the mind in upon herself 

Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts 
And spread them with a wider creeping ; felt 
Incumbencies more awful, visitings 

Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul, 

That tolerates the indignities of time 

And, from the center of eternity 

All finite motions overruling, lives 

In glory immutable. 


Yet, with all this love for nature and insight into her 
meaning, Wordsworth was a homely and almost a rustic 
poet. It was truth that he sought, even more than 
beauty. And he tended to express the truth he saw in 
common phrase. One can hardly avoid the conviction 
that the meager and plain surroundings of his childhood, 
and the lack of cultivated society, made him tolerant of 
tude and inharmonious speech, and ready to lapse into 
bare and dull expression, when the creative impulse 
within him grew weak. He had little or no sense of 
humor, to preserve him from unconsciously degenerat- 
ing into commonplace. Many of his minor poems are 
like Sunday-school talks in words of one syllable—they 
underrate the intelligence of his readers. Even in the 
larger poems there is not enough of linked sweetness 
to make up for the fact that they are so long drawn out. 


_ The truth is that all the best work of Wordsworth was 
done from his twenty-eighth to his thirty-eighth year. 
After that decade had passed, the spontaneity of his 


verse seemed to vanish, while yet his indomitable indus- 


try remained. From thirty-eight to eighty, a long 
course of forty-two years, he was fruitlessly chasing 


poetry, as the boy pursues the pot of gold at the foot 


of the rainbow. 


342 THE POET OF NATURE 


The sense of a vocation dawned upon him as early as 
his nineteenth year. He was then a student of St. 
John’s College, Cambridge. He had brought thither a 
robust vitality, a habit of solitary wandering in the 
woods and fields, and a genuinely meditative spirit. 
He was a great reader, but he was no great scholar. 
Yet university life strongly influenced him. As he sat 
in the chambers of Milton, or looked upon the statue of | 
Newton, the past got hold upon him. He says: | 


I could not print 
Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps 
Of generations of illustrious men, 
Unmoved. 







He became aware of the fact that he hada peculiar) 
gift of observation and insight, and that he might be) 
able, “else deeply sinning,” to leave behind him some) 
work which “pure hearts would reverence.” His con-) 
ception of his office was no mean or humble one. He 
held that no poet could be great unless he was a teacher 
as well as a versifier, and unless the result of his teach-| 
ing was the ennobling of character. He regarded Sir] 
Walter Scott, not as a poet, but as a novelist in verse, 
because he had “never written anything addressed to. 
the immortal part of man”; and Wordsworth was not| 
inconsistent with himself. when, on Scott’s departure to 
Naples in search of health, he declared that the might! 


Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes ; 
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue 

Than sceptred king or laureled conqueror knows, 
Follow this wondrous Potentate. 


So he did not think Goethe a great writer. Homer 











THE POET OF NATURAL RELIGION 343 


"and Shakespeare he called universal. ‘Goethe,’ he 
said, “tried the universal, without ever being able to 
avoid exposing his individuality, which his character was 
“not of a kind to dignify. His moral perceptions were 
“not sufficiently clear to make him anything but an arti- 
| ficial writer.” Wordsworth has expressed the sense of 
his mission in the words : 





He serves the Muses erringly and ill 
- Whose aim is pleasure light and fugitive. 
‘ O that my mind were equal to fulfill 
The comprehensive mandate which they give! 
Vain aspiration of an earnest will ! 
Yet in this moral strain a power may live. 


___ And, like Milton, he invokes the Spirit of God to 
help his high endeavor: 


Descend, prophetic Spirit ! that inspirest 

The human soul of universal earth, 

Dreaming on things to come, and dost possess 

A metropolitan temple in the hearts 

Of mighty poets ; upon me bestow 

A gift of genuine insight ; that my song 

With starlike virtue in its place may shine, 

Shedding benignant influence—and secure, 

Itself, from all malevolent effect 

Of those mutations that extend their sway 

Throughout the nether sphere ! 
___ It must not be inferred that Wordsworth was a specif- 
ically Christian poet. It was not his business to put 
_ dogma into verse, or to buttress any particular ecclesi- 
_astical system. He valued the Church of England as a 
_ safeguard of popular morals, a comforter of the poor, 
an elevator of national ideals, and a noble inheritance 


eo eet 


344 THE POET OF NATURE 


from the past. ‘I would lay down my life for the 
church,” he said. But it is still true that he did not 
often attend the services of the church. We are re- 
minded of the Polish nobleman who was ready to die | 
for his country, but who could not be prevailed upon to 
live in it. It was not so much the Christian scheme 
which the poet conceived himself as set to teach. It | 
was rather the great truths of natural religion, which | 
lieat the basis of the Christian scheme indeed, but which | 
may be treated apart from their relation to a super- | 
natural revelation. This is his meaning when he says: | 


I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety. 


God is manifested in nature. He may be recognized in | 
the unity, law, order, harmony, of the world. Our own | 
intelligence and affection find even in the physical uni- 
verse another and a higher intelligence and affection 
coming out to meet us. The storm reveals a power, | 
and the sunshine reveals a love, which gives us joy. 
This recognition of nature’s divinity, and the submission 
of the soul to its tranquilizing and restoring influence, | 
is what Wordsworth means by “natural piety.” 

This is not Christianity, but it is not incensistent 
with Christianity. God has not left himself without a 
witness, even where the light of Christ’s gospel has | 
never shone. Paul declares that “the invisible things | 
of him since the creation of the world are plainly seen, | 
being perceived through the things that are made, even | 
his everlasting power and divinity.” And these pre-_ 
suppositions of Christianity are of inestimable impor-_ 
tance. 








| 


NOT INCONSISTENT WITH CHRISTIANITY 345 


Men will not believe in supernatural revelation, un- 
less they first believe in a God from whom such super- 


‘natural revelation may come. The tendency of deistic 


thought has always been to render Christianity an im- 
pertinence and an absurdity. _Wordsworth’s poetry was 
one long protest against this banishment of God from 


‘his universe. Because he believes in “ Nature’s self, 


which is the breath of God,’’ he can also believe in “his 
pure word, by miracle revealed.” And rather than 
abandon this pure elementary faith in a divine life 
hidden beneath the raiment of the natural world, he 
would go back to heathen religion, because that still 
preserved some remnants of the truth. 


Great God ! I'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 


Wordsworth’s biographer tells us that “*The Eclectic 
Review’ criticised ‘The Excursion’ as pointedly in- 
Sinuating that nature is a sort of God, and that the love 
of nature is a sanctifying process.” It regarded the 
religious character of the poem as doubtful. All such 
criticism savors strongly of Philistinism. It is like 
denouncing Humboldt’s “Cosmos” as atheistic, because 


the author confines himself to physics and never once 


mentions the name of God. We must not judge a 
writer by what he does not say, but_only by what he 
does say. Let us grant him the right to choose his 
province. Wordsworth’s province was the religion of 


‘nature, and there he was great. It was well that he did 


| 


340 THE POET OF NATURE 


not attempt theology, for there he was not great. Yet 
he was a believer in the simple facts of Scripture. He 
left their systematizing and their interpretation to others, 
Perhaps the best understanding of his position may be 
gotten from his own words. He writes: | 










Theologians may puzzle their heads about dogmas as they will ;) 
the religion of gratitude cannot mislead us. Of that we are sure ;| 
and gratitude is the handmaid to hope, and hope the harbinger| 
of faith. I look abroad upon nature, | think of the best part of} 
our species, I lean upon my friends, and I meditate upon the 
Scripture, especially the Gospel of St. John, and my creed rises) 
up of itself, with the ease of an exhalation, yet a fabric of ada- 
mant. 


No account of Wordsworth’s life and work would be 
complete or even correct, which did not make mention 
of two other persons who had the largest influence} 
upon him. One of these was his sister Dorothy, and) 
the other was Coleridge. The death of the poet’s 
mother when he was eight years of age, and the death’ 
of his father when he was fourteen, had broken up the} 
family and had separated its members from one another. 
They lived with a grandfather or with an uncle. But. 
after Wordsworth finished his course at Cambridge, he} 
and his sister began their simple life together, and led 
that simple life for more than sixty years. It was one} 
soul in two bodies. When the poet married Mary) 
Hutchinson, ‘the quiet and kindly friend of his child- 
hood, brother and sister were still as inseparable as| 
ever. 

It is doubtful whether literary history can furnish 
another such instance of absolute devotion as that which 
Dorothy Wordsworth showed toward her brother. She 





DOROTHY COMPLEMENTED HER BROTHER = 347 


lived only in him and for him. The labor of writing 
was irksome to him; she put down upon paper line 
; upon line as the words fell from his lips. Endless copy- 
' ing of manuscript, after endless correction, occupied 
her often far on into the night. She was the constant 
“companion of his walks at all hours of daylight or dark, 
in all weathers, with little care for proper clothing or 
food, of which indeed there was never too much, for the 
Wordsworths lived for years at Grasmere on only seventy 
‘pounds ayear. ‘They were poor, and were not ashamed 
‘tobe poor. Yet Coleridge said: “His is the happiest 
family I ever saw.’’ They lived for a great end, the 
development of a noble poetic gift, the discovery and 
expression of the beauty and meaning of the world. 
Wordsworth was ‘very much resigned to his own com- 
pany.’ He would often walk on in sublime meditation, 
while wife and sister submissively followed, hopefully 
waiting for the utterances of the oracle. Coleridge was 
often with them. The four discussed every aspect of 
the scenes about them. Then they stopped to eat their 
bread and cheese. Dorothy says in her diary: “We 
"rested upon a moss-covered rock, rising out of the bed 
‘of the river. William and Coleridge repeated and read 
verses. I drank a little brandy and water, and was in 
heaven.” 
| Dorothy Wordsworth, as_ her diaries show, was a 
woman of genius. She furnished the complement to 
her brother; he found in her the sprightliness and 
sweetness which in him were somewhat lacking. She 
was no merely passive recipient, for she was more full 
of suggestion even than he. Exquisite sensibility was 
_ united with extraordinary insight, the deepest feeling 


348 THE POET OF NATURE 


with the minutest observation. Innocent, ardent, lov- | 
ing, the secret of nature seemed disclosed to her, but all 
the treasure that she found she laid at her brother’s feet. | 
There was a sort of communism between them. He 
used her journals at times for the material of his poems, | 
and even extracted bits of it for his letters, because he| 
could not compose anything better. Dorothy did every- | 
thing for him, even wrote his love letters, since he | 
detested correspondence. There was little of romance | 
in him; there was much of romance in her. He could 
go to the cemetery and look at the tombstones a few| 
hours after his wedding, and that in spite of the fact | 
‘that the exquisite poem, “She was a Phantom of De 
light,’ was written for his bride. His sister did much | 
to correct this austerity. And though, like Milton, he 
did not greatly devote himself to his sister or to his wife, 
he has recognized his debt to Dorothy in his poems. | 
He says, for example: | 











I too exclusively esteemed that love 

And sought that beauty which (as Milton sings) 
Hath terror in it. Thou didst soften down 
This oversternness. 


And it was of Dorothy that he wrote: 


She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
And humble cares and delicate fears, 
And love and thought and joy. 


It could be wished that the record of such lifelong, 
sisterly devotion could be written without intimation | 
that harm of any sort had come from it. But the poet 
himself was rendered too autocratic and seclusive, while 


THE INFLUENCE OF COLERIDGE 349 


Dorothy's health was injured by exhausting walks and 
long exposures to wind and rain. Wordsworth’s own 
robust constitution could endure the strain, but with his 
sister the intense spirit “o’erinformed its tenement of 
clay,’ and her last years were years of mental alienation, 

with only occasional gleams of smoldering genius. 
_ Yet it was she who, at an earlier day, when her brother 
was for a time skeptical, depressed, bewildered, almost 
ready to give up his vocation in despair, brought him 
back to calmness and to faith. “Then it was,” he says: 


Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good, 

That the beloved sister in whose sight 

Those days were passed—now speaking in a voice 
Of sudden admonition, like a brook 

That did but cross a lonely road, and now 

Is seen, heard, felt, and caught at every turn, 
Companion never lost through many a league— 
Maintained for me a saving intercourse 

With my true self; for though bedimmed and changed 
Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed 
Than as a clouded and a waning moon : 

She whispered still that brightness would return ; 
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still 

A poet, made me seek beneath that name, 

And that alone, my office upon earth. 


Coleridge too must be mentioned, because he con: 
_ tributed to Wordsworth an element of ideality which 
| would otherwise have been imperfectly developed. We 
must remember their early friendship and their great 
influence upon each other. Damon and Pythias had 
scarcely a warmer affection. Here too, each furnished 
what the other lacked. Coleridge had more of the 
native poetic instinct, but he had also the discursive 


350 THE POET OF NATURE 


and philosophic mind. It may be questioned whether : 
we should ever have found in Wordsworth the meta- | 
physical element which here and there characterizes his _ 
poems, if it had not been for his long communings with | 
Coleridge. Coleridge was ‘the Friend” to whom the 
outpourings of heart in “The Prelude” were addressed. _ 
On the other hand it was Wordsworth who gave to | 
Coleridge whatever practical wisdom he ever had, and | 
who taught him that 








to the solid ground | 
Of Nature trusts the mind that builds for aye. 


Wordsworth himself was ignorant enough of the | 
affairs of this life, but Coleridge was an infant beside 
him. When the two tried for a half-hour to get the | 
collar off a horse without ever thinking of turning it, 
they showed that they were more familiar with 
“the light that never was on sea or land,” than they 
were with the lights of modern horsemanship. Cole- | 
ridge had imagination, and could write his “Hymn at 
Chamounix,” with its sublime description of the ava- | 
lanche, without ever having seen either Chamounix or 
an avalanche. But Wordsworth taught him something 
of the observation of nature. Wordsworth suggested | 
those realistic features of the “Ancient Mariner,” the 
shooting of the albatross and the navigation of the ship 
by the dead men. In fact, the interpretation of nature 
as the continual manifestation of God may possibly be 
the echo of Wordsworth’s thought. At any rate, Cole 
ridge had in some way learned the secret which Plato | 
und Plotinus had taught long before, and in his “ A¢olian 
Harp” had written: 


—-_ — 





+ --——-  - 











THE BREAKING OF THEIR INTIMACY 351 


And what if all of animated Nature 

Be but organic harps diversely framed, 

That tremble into thought, as o’ er them sweeps, 
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 

At once the soul of each and God of all. 


It seems a great pity that these two gifted souls, so 
fitted to supplement each other’s virtues and correct 
each other’s faults, should, after long and loving inter- 
course, have fallen apart and ceased greatly to influence 
each other. It was partly the fault of circumstances, 
partly the fault of natural temperament. Coleridge’s 
marriage was unhappy, and separation from wife and 
family made him a wanderer. Opium, taken at first to 
ease pain, became a fearful tyrant; conscience became 
dull, and will became impotent; to know that a thing 
ought to be done was the very reason why the doing of 


it was impossible. Coleridge fled from Wordsworth’s 


compassion, and an estrangement began which was 


_never wholly removed. Possibly it was this estrange- 


ment which Coleridge had in mind when he wrote: 


Alas, they had been friends in youth ; 
But whispering tongues can poison truth ; 
And constancy lives in realms above ; 
And life is thorny ; and youth is vain ; 
And to be wroth with one we love 
Doth work like madness in the brain. 
And thus it chanced, as I divine, 
With Roland and Sir Leoline. 

Each spake words of high disdain 
And insult to his heart’s best brother ; 
They parted-—ne’ er to meet again ! 
But never either found another 

To free the hollow heart from paining. 
They stood aloof, the scars remaining, 


352 THE POET OF NATURE 


Like cliffs that had been rent asunder ; 

A dreary sea flows now between ;— 

But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, 
Shall wholly do away, I ween, 

The marks of that which once hath been. 


And yet each loved the other to the end. The sepa- 


ration was due to mutual knowledge of each other's | 


limitations. Coleridge disliked Wordsworth’s excessive 


frugality, and spoke of his occasional fits of hypochon- | 


dria. Yet he called Wordsworth “the first and greatest 


philosophical poet.’’ Wordsworth on the other hand | 
thought Coleridge “destined to be unhappy.” When_ 
Coleridge died, the poet felt that he could not write an | 


elegy; the tie between them was too close, the pain was 
too overwhelming. Coleridge, as Dr. Knight had said, 
“was his earliest and closest friend, and his most illus- 
trious contemporary in English literature.” All he 
could venture to say of him, a year and a half after he 
was dead, is in these following words: 


Every moral power of Coleridge 

Is frozen at its marvelous source;. . 

The rapt one of the godlike forehead, 

The heaven-eyed creature, sleeps in earth. 


The three poems which mark the highest poetical 
attainment of Wordsworth are the ‘“Intimations of 
Immortality,” “Tintern Abbey,” and “Ode to Duty.” 
The first has in it most of philosophy, the second most 
of religion, the third most of morality. Together they 
furnish an admirable test of the poet’s range and qual- 
ity. So lofty and noble are they, that we are tempted 
to wish, for nis fame’s sake, that he had never written 




















“INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 353 


anything else, and that these shining mountain peaks 
had not required so vast a body of commonplace earth 
and rock for their foundation. Yet these great poems 
are the outgrowth of Wordsworth’s whole literary life 
and work, and they cannot be understood by themselves. 
Let us take them successively and subject them to criti- 
cal examination, in the light of what we have learned 
of the poet’s mind and aim. 

The ‘“Intimations of Immortality’ 


y 


is an attempt to 


show that man must live after death because he lived 


before he was born. The argument is as old as Plato. 
In the “ Phado”’ this is the chief and most impressive 
consideration upon which the sublime faith in immor- 
tality is based. Plato held that intuitive ideas, such as 
ideas of space, time, cause, substance, right, God, are 
reminiscences of things learned in a previous state of 
being. He regarded the body as the grave of the soul, 
and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge before 
it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have 
knowledge after it left the body. But even in Plato 
this argument is based upon an unconscious identifica- 
tion of the ideal with the actual. The truth at the 
foundation of the theory of pre-existence is simply the 
ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of 
God—that is, God’s foreknowledge of it. The intui- 
tive ideas, of which the soul finds itself in possession, 
are really evolved from itself ; in other words, man is so 
constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper 
occasions or conditions; the fact that they are not de- 
rived from sense by no means proves that they are rec- 
ollections of what was learned in a previous or time- 


less state of being. 


x 


354 THE POET OF NATURE 


Yet the persistence of this speculation is a curiosity — 
in philosophy, theology, and literature. Philo and Ori- | 
gen both held to it, the former to account for the soul’s 
imprisonment in the body, the latter to justify the dis- 
parity of conditions under which men enter the world, | 
Kant and Julius Miiller have advocated it in Germany, | 
and Edward Beecher in America, upon the ground that | 
the inborn depravity of the human will can be explained 
only by supposing a personal act of self-determination — 
before the present life began. The large place which 
the doctrine of the transmigration of souls holds in the 
Indian religions is known to all, but it may not be so _ 
eenerally known that a sort of metempsychosis has been 
favored in Scotland, and in our own day, by Professor 
Knight, the editor and biographer of Wordsworth. | 
That Wordsworth himself made the idea the basis of | 
his great poem is not so wonderful when we remember 
that Vaughan in the “ Retreate,” so early as 1621, used 
the same idea, and probably gave to Wordsworth the | 
clew which he has more successfully followed, as Tenny- | 
son in his “Two Voices,” and Browning in his “La | 
Saisiaz,” have followed Wordsworth. | 

The poets, however, have added something to the. 
philosophers. They have utilized a peculiar experience | 
which men like Walter Scott have vividly described, | 
namely the apparent recollection that we have seen at | 
some time past a landscape which we know to be now | 
for the first time before us, or that before the present | 
time we have passed through an exigency which our | 
sober reason tells us we now first confront. It is prob-| 
ably an illusion of the memory, a mistaking of a part) 
for the whole: we have seen something like a part of 























| 


SEEMING RECOLLECTIONS OF THE PAST 555 


the landscape—we fancy that we have seen this land- 
scape and the whole of it. So our recollection of a past 
event is one whole, but this idea of the whole may have 


an indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within 


it; the sight of something similar to one of these parts 
suggests the whole which the parts make up. Augus- 
tine hinted that this illusion of the memory may have 


. played an important part in developing the belief in 


metempsychosis—we infer that, since what we remem- 
ber has never happened in this world, it must have hap- 
pened in some world which we inhabited before we 
entered upon this. 

The fact that Coleridge busied himself with this 
problem, and suggested that “likeness in part tends to 
become likeness of the whole,” makes it a very interest- 
ing question how far Wordsworth’s adoption of the idea 
may have been due to the influence of Coleridge. But 
a still more interesting question is how far Wordsworth’s 
adoption of the idea may be said to express his own 
conviction of the truth, or how far we may believe it to 
be a jeu d’esprit, or a mere device of fancy to attract 
us to his poetry. Here we must confess that what we 
know of the poet’s solemn earnestness, his passion for 
truth, his scorn of all disingenuous arts and tricks, in- 
clines us to reject the second explanation and to accept 
the first. In this greatest of his poems he seems, if 
ever, to be speaking out of his own innermost mind and 
heart. The “Intimations of Immortality from Recol- 
lections of Early Childhood” is not argument from our 
present recollections of our past childhood, but from 
the recollections which we had, when we were children, 
of a previous state of being. A few quotations from 





356 THE POET OF NATURE 


the poem will possibly assume a new aspect when we 
remember this : d 


Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : <> 
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar : 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come . 

From God, who is our home. 





The homely Nurse [Earth] doth all she can 
To make her foster child, her inmate man, 
Forget the glories he hath known, 
And that imperial palace whence he came. 


Thou, over whom thy immortality 

Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave, 

A presence which is not to be put by ; 

Thou little child, yet glorious in the might 

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height ! 


O joy ! that in our embers — 
Is something that doth live, 

That nature yet remembers 
What’was so fugitive ! 


Not for these I raise 
The song of thanks and praise, 
But for those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Falling from us, vanishings, 
Blank misgivings of a creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized, 
High instincts before which our mortal nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised : 
But for those first affections 
Those shadowy recollections 


RECOLLECTIONS OF PRE-EXISTENCE IN GOD Crews 


Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing : 
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence ; truths that wake 
To perish never ; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 
Nor man, nor boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
Can utterly abolish or destroy ! 
Hence in a season of calm weather, 


Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither, 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 


It is impossible to read these lines carefully without 
perceiving that the recollections which the poet attrib- 
utes to childhood are not recollections of a personal 
existence in a preceding state of being. They are 
rather recollections of what belonged to it before it 
“drew from out the vast,’ as Tennyson has expressed 
it; survivals, in the finite personality, of knowledge in 
the infinite personality from which it has come; in 
other words, God’s ideas revealing themselves in the 
reature who partakes of his life. Not ideal pre-exist- 
ence in God’s foreknowledge, but substantial pre-exist- 
ence in God’s being, is the thought of Wordsworth. 
While nature is the constant expression of the divine 
mind and will, man is an actual emanation from God 


himself, and therefore 
a being, 
Both in perception and discernment, first 


358 THE POET OF NATURE 


In every capability of rapture, 

Through the divine effect of power and love: 
As, more than anything we know, instinct 
With godhead and, by reason and by will, 
Acknowledging dependency sublime. 


Our destiny, our being’s heart and home 
Is with infinitude and only there. 









And this interpretation is confirmed by other passages 
in the “ Excursion’ as well as in the “ Prelude”: 


Ah, why in age 
Do we revert so fondly to the walks 
Of childhood, but that there the soul discerns 
The dear memorial footsteps unimpaired 
Of her own native vigor ; thence can hear 
Reverberations ; and a choral song, 
Commingling with the incense that ascends 
Undaunted toward the imperishable heavens 
From her own lonely altar. 


Thou, thou alone 
Art everlasting, and the blessed spirits 
Which thou includest, as the sea her waves. 


Our childhood sits, 
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne, 
That hath more power than all the elements ; 
I guess not what this tells of Being past, 
Nor what it augurs of the life to come. 


We must confess that if this were all, the proof of 
immortality would be defective. If the soul had no 
personal existence before it entered upon its present 
state, it may have no personal existence after this pres- 
ent state is ended. As it came from the boundless 
infinite, so to the boundless infinite it may return, merg- 


IMAGINATION IS CREATIVE REASON 359 


ing its little wave once more in the great ocean from 
which it sprang. But another thought is suggested 
which helps the proof. It is that of the divine love. 
He who gave being to these sons of men will not disap- 
point their expectations nor put an end to their progress. 
Made in the image of God, only an eternity will suffice 
for their development. Their sympathies are evidence 
of God’s sympathies. Their very longing for immor-. 
tality is the impulse of divinity within them, and so is 
prophetic of the future: 


What though the radiance which was once so bright 
Be now forever taken from my sight, 
Though nothing can bring back the hour 

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower ; 

We will grieve not, rather find 

Strength in what remains behind ; 

In the primal sympathy 

Which having been must ever be, 

In the soothing thoughts that spring 

Out of human suffering, 

In the faith that looks through death, 
In years that bring the philosophic mind. 


That Wordsworth advocated no pantheistic confound- 
ing of the soul with God, but rather believed in a per- 
so consciousness and life beyond the grave, is eVvi- 
dent from his poem, “The Primrose of the Rock” : 


Sin-blighted though we are, we too, 
The reasoning sons of men, 
From one oblivious winter called, 
Shall rise and breathe again ; 
And in eternal summer lose 
Our threescore years and ten. 


360 THE POET OF NATURE 


To humbleness of heart descends 
This prescience from on high, 

The faith that elevates the just, 
Before and when they die ; 

And makes each soul a separate heaven, . 
A court for Deity. 





In the lines composed a few miles above “Tintern | 
Abbey,” on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a | 
tour, we have the poet’s most complete expression of 
his views of the relation between nature and God. But 
in order fully to understand it, we need to take a slight 
preliminary survey of some of his other utterances, es- 
pecially those with reference to imagination and the 
office of a poet. As I have already intimated, Words- | 
worth regards love as a medium of insight into truth. 
Beauty cannot be perceived by him who has no love for | 
beauty, and the morally right cannot be perceived by | 
him who has no love for the morally right. Reason, in 
its largest sense, is far more than reasoning—it is the 
mind’s whole power of knowing, and to the highest ex- | 
ercise of reason a right state of the sensibilities and | | 
affections is just as essential as merely perceptive and | 
logical power. | 

Intellect is not the whole of man; the integral man is 
made up of emotion as well as intellect. The feelings 
give wings to the intellect and permit it to soar into 
lofty regions of truth, when without right feeling intellect 
would grovel on the earth and learn nothing of the | 
true meaning of the universe. Nor can mere love for | 
the creature ensure the higher intelligence; only love 
to God can enable us to understand the least of God’s | 
works. All the delights of love are pitiable— | 


——————_ 





AN ORGAN FOR THE RECOGNITION OF TRUTH 361 


Unless this love by a still higher love 

Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe, 
Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer, 

By heaven inspired ; that frees from chains the soul, 
Lifted, in union with the purest, best 

Of earth-born passions, on the wings of praise, 
Bearing a tribute to the Almighty’s throne. 


And now we have, directly following this passage of the 
“ Prelude,” the most notable and valuable definition of 
imagination to be found in all poetical literature : 


This spiritual love acts not nor can exist 
Without imagination, which, in truth, 
Is but another name for absolute power, 
And clearer insight, amplitude of mind, 
And reason in her most exalted mood. 


The imagination of a pure and loving soul is there- 
fore an organ for the recognition of truth. The crea- 


_tive faculty in the poet is like the microscope or the 


telescope—it does not invent but rather discovers ; that 
others do not see is simply the fault of their defective 
vision. And imagination in man enables him to enter 
into the thought of God—the creative element in us is 
the medium through which we perceive the meaning of 
the Creator in his creation. The world without answers 
to the world within, because God is the soul of both. 


_ Even the least sensitive are stirred at times by the cata- 


ract or the storm. 


Tke power which all 
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus 
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express 
Resemblance of that glorious faculty 
That higher minds bear with them as their own; 


362 THE POET OF NATURE | 


This is the very spirit in which they deal 
With the whole compass of the universe ; | 
They from their native selves can send abroad 
Kindred mutations. . . 





They build up greatest things ! 
From least suggestions. . . 
Such minds are truly from the Deity, 
For they are Powers ; and hence the highest bliss | 
That flesh can know is theirs—the consciousness 
Of Whom they are, habitually infused 
Through every image and through every thought, | 
And all affections by communion raised 
From earth to heaven, from human to divine. 





So to the poet: 


The unity of all hath been revealed, 
Feeling has to him imparted power 

That through the growing faculties of sense 
Doth, like an agent of the one great Mind, 
Create, creator and receiver both, 

Working but in alliance with the works 
Which it beholds. 


He catches glimpses of affinities 


In objects where no brotherhood exists 
To passive minds. . . | 

Even in their fixed and steady lineaments 
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind, 
Expression ever varying. 





I felt the sentiment of Being, spread | 
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still, . . 
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven 
With every form of creature as it looked | 
Toward the Uncreated with a countenance 
Of adoration, with an eye of love. 





‘‘TINTERN ABBEY” _ 363 


Coming now to Wordsworth’s great poem of “ Tin- 
tern Abbey,” we can see how the poet has condensed a 
whole system of thought into his verse. The ministries 
of nature have given him “sensations sweet’ and happy 
memories : 


Nor less, I trust, 
To them I may have owed another gift, 
Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
In which the burden of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world 
Is lightened—that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on— 
Until, the breath of. this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul ; 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things. 


[t was not always thus, however : 


For nature then 

To me was all in all. I cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, 
And all its aching joys are now no more, 
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this . 

| Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other gifts 
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, 


364 THE POET OF NATURE 


Abundant recompense. For I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 

Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity, 

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused, | 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: . 
A motion and a spirit that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
A lover of the. meadows and the woods 

And mountains ; and of all that we behold 

From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear, both what they half create 

And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize 

In nature and the language of the sense 

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. 














We can understand now what Wordsworth means by 
Nature, and why he can recognize in her an instructor, 
protector, and comforter. If Nature had been to him. 
a dead somewhat, something unintelligent, foreign, and: 
unknown, no verse of this sort would have been por 
sible. It is only because Nature is to him, as Goethe 
phrased it, “the living garment of the Deity,” nay, 
more, the constant expression of divine intelligence and 
love, that he can cherish toward it affection and find in 
it a guide. Nature is not created by fiat and then left 


by God to itself. The Creator is ever active—he is in 





| 


NATURE AN INSTRUCTOR 305 


the smallest of his works, and the smallest of them, as 
‘truly as the greatest, is the arena in which his omni- 
presence and omnipotence display themselves. There- 


fore 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 


But therefore also the simple and common emotions 
and affections of humanity are the best guide to the in- 
terpretation of nature, since the same God who is pres- 
ent in the one is present also in the other. From this 
point of view Wordsworth’s preference for humble life, 
with its joys and sorrows, is explicable. It was the 
primitive and unsophisticated that taught him most of 
God. The universal feelings, he thought, were the most 
significant. The hopes and fears of all tell us more 
about the secret of the world than do the hopes and 
fears of some, even though they be the rich and culti- 

vated few. His poetry busied itself with the toil and 
suffering, the hope and love, of the poor. He disclosed 
the hidden sources of content which are possessed by 
the shepherd on the hillside and the grandame at her 
loom. He sang of “joy in widest commonalty spread.” 
He glorified the obscure. He had hope for the fallen. 
And that because he saw in man, as in nature, the com- 
mon life of God. 


Neither vice nor guilt, 
Debasement undergone by body or mind, 

Nor all the misery forced upon my sight, 

Misery not lightly passed, but sometimes scanned 
Most feelingly, could overthrow my trust 

In what we may become. 


- T have reserved to the last the mention of the ‘Ode 





, 


366 THE POET OF NATURE 4 


to Duty,” not only because the ethical seems naturally 
to follow the philosophical and theological, but because 
this ode, in my judgment, is the most noble and com- 
plete of Wordsworth’s poems. Though briefer by far 
than either of the two just examined, it is more sus- | 
tained in its dignity, and has a flavor of antique grandeur 
which reminds us of the best work of Milton. In this 
ode, moreover, we have the best assurance that Words | 
worth was no pantheist, and that he never meant, when 
he looked upon God as the life of nature and of man, to 
break down all moral boundaries and confound the | 
human personality with the divine. If this had been | 
the case, conscience would have been declared to be. 
God’s own voice within the soul. In the first line of | 
the ode, however, duty is addressed as : 














Stern daughter of the voice of God. ! 


It is an allusion to the rabbinic doctrine of the | 
Bath-kol, or “ Daughter of the Voice.” The later Jewish | 
teachers. held that the Holy Spirit spoke during the 
tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first | 
temple by the prophets, but under the second temple) 
by the Bath-kol, a divine intimation as inferior to the | 
oracular voice proceeding from the mercy-seat as a 
daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother, 
Hence an approving conscience came to be called’ 
Bath-kol, and the rabbins intimated thereby that while! 
conscience holds a relation to God’s voice, is indeed the 
reflection or echo of that voice, it is not to be identified | 
with it. Man has a connection of life with God, even” 
as his being has sprung from God. But the creature is) 
not the Creator. Man has an independent mind and 


— 





CONSCIENCE A WITNESS AGAINST PANTHEISM 307 


will. Though his conscience testifies to his divine 


| 
} 
| 
| 


origin, it also testifies to the fact that he is free. 


Look up to heaven! the industrious sun 
Already half his race hath run ; 

He cannot halt or go astray 

But our immortal spirits may. 


Conscience therefore is an eternal witness in the soul 


against pantheism, and our poet in his adoption of the 


rabbinical definition of conscience intimates his belief 
in man’s treedom and responsibility. Not simply the 
initial apostrophe to Duty, but the whole poem from 
beginning to end, is instinct with moral life. Words- 
worth recognizes the beauty and blessedness of a loving 
and spontaneous obedience. But he recognizes human 
weakness and perversity also, and the need of severe 
reproof at times to keep the soul from straying from 


the path of rectitude. 


Serene will be our days, and bright 
And-happy will our nature be, 
When love is an unerring light, 
And joy its own security. 
And they a blissful course may hold 
Even now who, not unwisely bold, 
Live in the spirit of this creed, 
Yet seek thy firm support, according to their need. 


Then comes confession of past error and sincere re- 


pentance for the’ wrong, together with yearning for a 
State where the will is secure in righteousness. He 
chooses to be the bondman of duty, rather than to be 
the bondman of sin. 


Me this unchartered freedom tires ; 
I feel the weight of chance desires ; 


68 THE POET OF NATURE 


(oP) 


My hopes no more must change their name, 
I long for a repose that ever is the same. 


Stern Lawgiver, yet thou dost wear 

The Godhead’s most benignant grace ; 
Nor know we anything so fair 

As is the smile upon thy face ; 
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, ‘| 
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are 

firm and strong. 





To humbler functions, awful Power, 
I call thee : I myself commend 

Unto thy guidance from this hour. 
Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 

Give unto me, made lowly wise, 

The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 

The confidence of reason give ; 

And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live. — 


I have said that Wordsworth is not a specifically 
Christian poet, and we shall look through his writings 
in vain for any evidence that he intended to teach the 
details of Christian doctrine. Yet the spirit of his 
poetry is the spirit of Christianity, and that in spite of the, 
fact that he felt it his mission to be the poet of nature. 
He never would have been able to find in nature so) 
much to awe and to console, he never could have seen 
in her so much of truth and love, if he had not carried) 
into his contemplations what he had learned from the 
gospel of Christ. It is the old story of Plato’s cave. 
He who has once explored the cave with a torch cam 
afterward make his way through in the dark. Many an! 
ethical philosopher like Spencer imagines his conclu: 






HIS POETRY ESSENTIALLY CHRISTIAN 369 


sions about man’s being to be the result of his own 
Insight, when in fact they are unconscious plagiarisms 
from the Christian revelation. We have followed 
that torch through the recesses of the cavern, and 
only for that reason are we now able to find our way 
through them alone. The interpretation of nature, as 
well as the interpretation of man, is an exclusively 
Christian achievement. The wisdom and love of God 
were never seen in nature, until Christ himself had 
been revealed as the Lord of nature and yet as the 
Redeemer of man. 

There are those who refuse to call Wordsworth a 
great poet, for the reason that there are so many com- 
monplace and prosaic pages in his collected works. 
But there are two reasons for calling him great which 
these critics overlook: First, the large body of genuine 
poetry which these works contain; and, secondly, the 
new bent and insight which these ai have communi- 
cated to literature. The sonnets of Wordsworth con- 
stitute of themselves our noblest collection after those 
yf Shakespeare and Milton, and there is a grave and 
serious beauty even in poems so long as the “ Prelude” 
ind the “Excursion.” His chief claim to greatness, 
iowever, is this, that he has not only apprehended and 
‘xpressed the divinity of nature as it had never been 
'pprehended and expressed before, but that he has done 
his in such a way as to mold and change the poetry of 
Ms country and of the world, and to begin a new epoch 
n the history of literature. 

His belief in this divinity of nature was so utter that 
he homeliest things were to him transfigured. The 


oughest aspects of humanity and the boldest scenes 
We 


= pee 


7O THE POEL OF NATURE 


Or 


of the physical world were full of interest, because they 
conveyed some thought of God. They seemed to him) 
so interesting in themselves that they needed no artistic. 
charms of verse: let the poetry that described them. 
be as bare as the rocks, and it still would have power to 
move the heart of man. Yes, we say, but only if the 
heart of man be prepared to receive it. The clew must. 
first be given; the taste must first be formed; the love 
of nature must first be implanted. | 

It is no wonder that the admirers of mechanical verse 
and the devotees of fashion and convention had no ears 
to hear the sober and solemn music of Wordsworth— 
they even denied that there was music there. Jeffrey, 
of the “Edinburgh Review,” read “The Excursion, 
and declared that it would never do. It took almost 
forty years to convince the English-speaking world that 
a new poetic luminary had risen upon the horizon. But 
when the degree of Doctor of Civil Law was conferre¢ 
upon the poet by the University of Oxford, and the 
whole auditory of England’s picked and sifted scholar 
rose as one man with shouts and cheers to do him rever 
ence; when Sir Robert Peel overbore his modesty an¢ 
well-nigh entreated him to accept the poet-laureateship 
not because England gave him anything more to do bu 
because England demanded the privilege of rewardin; 
what he had done; it became clear that the tide hai 
forever turned and that his name was to be inscribe 
upon the rolls of everlasting fame as the first an 
greatest poet of nature and of common ne An 
Tennyson, when he succeeded to the office, only did jus| 
honor to the spirit of Wordsworth’s verse when he cor 
gratulated himself upon receiving 


















RECOGNITION OF WORDSWORTH’S CLAIMS 371 


The laurel greener from the brows 
Of him who uttered nothing base. 


It is not possible to concede supreme merit to more 
than a few, and those by no means the longest, of 
Wordsworth’s poems. But no poet is to be judged by 


his worst. Let Wordsworth be judged by his best, and 
he takes the rank of a great poet—the greatest poet 
who had appeared since Milton. Browning and Tenny- 
son have eclipsed his fame, but only because they have 
drawn into their own writings much of his peculiar light. 


He has added a permanent element to the world’s 
thought; he has given us a new method of regarding 
the world of nature and of man; he has increased the 
calmness, the comfort, the hope, of humanity. William 
Watson has given proof of his critical, as well as of his 
poetic, genius in his lines upon “ Wordsworth’s Grave,” 
and his estimate may fitly close this essay : 

| Not Milton’s keen, translunar music thine ‘ 

ae Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view, 
] Not Shelley’s flush of rose on peaks divine : 

Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew. 


What hast thou that could make so large amends 
For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed— 

Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends ? 
Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest. 


From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze, 
From Byron's tempest-anger, tempest-mirth, 

Men turned to thee and found—not blast and blaze, 
Tumult of tottering heavens—but peace on earth. 


| Not peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower, 
There in white languors to decline and cease ; 


“ree 


372 THE POET OF NATURE 





But peace whose names are also rapture, power, 
Clear sight, and love: for these are parts of peace. 


It may be that his manly chant, beside 
More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune ; 

It may be thought has broadened, since he died, 
Upon the century's noon;.. . | 

Enough that there is none since risen who sings . 
A song so gotten of the immediate soul, | 

So instant from the vital fount of things 
Which is our source and goal ; 

And though at touch of later hands there float | 
More artful tones than from his lyre he drew, 

Ages may pass ere trills another note 
So sweet, so great, so true. 











On 
a 
Z 
= 
O 
~ 
pO 








BROWNING 


HIS POETRY AND HIS THEOLOGY 
I 


Ir is a serious question whether this essay would ever 
have been written if I had not awhile ago seen Robert 
Browning—not in the flesh, but in the Watts’ collec- 
tion. I do not refer to the collection of Isaac Watts, 
valuable as that collection is, but to that of George 
Frederick Watts, who puts his poetry upon canvas in- 
stead of coining it into song. Many critics regard this 
particular Watts as the best modern reviver of the color 
and the ideality of the Venetian masters. 

A considerable number of his pictures were exhibited 
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was “Love 
and Death ’’—a rosy boy, with appealing look, vainly 
striving to press back from the threshold a veiled and 
sombre form that trampled under his feet the flowers 
falling from Love’s fingers. There was “Love and 
Life’”—a noble, masculine figure helping a fainting 
‘maiden along a rocky, precipitous path—the lesson being 
this, that life cannot get on without love. There was 
“Time, Death, and Judgment ’—Time, an immortal 
youth, Death, a solemn, dusky shape, both wading 
through a deep stream, while Judgment, with flaming 
‘sword, followed close behind. 

_ These three were all of them great pictures—great 
375 


376 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 





because they bodied forth ideal truth and gave it power 
over the heart. But the portraits of the collection were 
more impressive still. The realistic method was never, 
more rigidly applied. Each subject was treated in its | 
own way. The artist had seized the central feature of 
each personality and had set it forth so vividly and 
powerfully that the living man stood revealed before 
you in lineaments never to be forgotten. | 
There was Lord Lawrence, a swarthy face againgl | 
a lurid background, as if just emerging from the smoke) 
and flame and blood of the Indian mutiny. There was 
Sir Frederick Leighton, president of the Royal Acad-) 
emy, all elegance and jollity, as if he cared not a fig) 
whether his special school of painting kept or not. | 
There was John Stuart Mill, cold and intellectual, as i 
meditating whether in some distant star like Sirius two. 
and two might not possibly make five. There was John) 
Lothrop Motley, the very pink of a literary aristocrat. 
There was Cardinal Manning, all scarlet and lace, all) 
dignity and devotion, but with an ascetic air that seemed 
to say he had not had a good meal of victuals since he 
entered the Roman church. ‘There was Thomas Car-| 
lyle, biting through his under lip for very groutiness.| 
There was Swinburne, a pert little counter-jumper, with: 
red hair flying all abroad as if he had just received a| 
shock of electricity. There was Alfred Tennyson, with 
melancholy and self-consciousness only slightly relieved 
by the remembrance of his elevation to the House of 
Lords. 
And there, finally, was Robert Browning, healthy,| 
robust, sagacious, subtle ; seemingly a large-minded cot-; 
ton manufacturer, rather than a retail vender of “ Red- 














THE STORY OF BROWNING'S LIFE 377 


cotton Night-caps” ; with good humor, knowledge of 


| 


affairs, insight into character, determination to express 
_what he saw; but, as for “the soul of melody,” “sing- 


ing as the bird sings,” or anything sensuous, senti- 


mental, or purely artistic, why, it was simply not there. 
Philosopher, critic of life, man of the world? Yes. 


But, poet? Well, if so, not one of the common sort. 


Not Tennyson’s 


The poet in a golden clime was born, 


but Emerson’s 


The free winds told him what they knew, 


1s the verse to describe him. Yet, when I saw the por- 


trait, I felt that I had new light thrown upon all that 
Browning ever wrote. The man interpreted his work. 


I recognized a new species of the genus “poet —one 


_who has made a sort of poetry so entirely his own that 


_we shall have to pull down our barns and build greater, 
or else construct an annex to our old scheme of classi- 
' fication, in order to make room for him and take him in. 

That Robert Browning is a great writer, the story of 
his life sufficiently demonstrates. Born in 1812, he was 
graduated at the London University before reaching the 


age of twenty. He then spent some years south of the 


/ Alps, rummaging about in the libraries of old monas- 
teries and inspecting the pictures of old cathedrals, till 
Walter Savage Landor could truly say that Browning 
never strikes a false note when he treats of Italy. 
“Pauline” was his first printed poem; “ Paracelsus,” 
published in 1836, his first tragedy. His “ Strafford” 
was represented upon the stage and failed, though Mac- 


378 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


ready took the principal réle in 1837. He married | 
Elizabeth Barrett in 1846, and Mrs. Browning died in | 


1861. 
During all these and the following years Browning 


has been a prolific writer. As many as ten thick vol- | 
umes attest his industry. Yet he has never caught the | 
popular ear—he has never tried to catch it. His pro- | 
ductions have had to make their way against storms of | 
criticism, but they have been read by a continually in- | 
creasing number of thoughtful people. Whatever the | 
student of literature may think of Browning, he must | 
take account of the fact that never before was therea | 
writer of verse for the study of whose writings during | 
his lifetime clubs were formed in every large city of | 
both hemispheres—the proceedings of some of these | 


clubs being regularly published, like the transactions of 
learned societies. 


Here is at least a literary phenomenon. There are | 


two possible explanations: Either Robert Browning 1s 
a plausible pretender, or he is a great poet. Is Robert 


Browning a great poet? Well, “that depends.” We. 
must know what poetry is and what Robert Browning | 
is. I shall treat my reader therefore to a definition of | 
poetry which, however defective in other respects it may 


be, will at least have the merit of being brand-new. I 


shall then weigh Robert Browning in these balances | 


and see whether he is found wanting. | 
Poetry is an imaginative reproduction of the universe 


in its ideal relations and the expression of these relations | 
in rhythmical literary form. The meaning of this defi- 
nition will more fully appear if we say concretely that | 
the poet is, first, a creator ; secondly, an idealizer ; and, 

















THE CREATIVE ELEMENT IN POETRY 379 


thirdly, a literary artist. Take the first of these. There 
is a creative element in all true poetry. The poet is 
| etymologically a “maker,” not in the sense in which 
God is the maker of all, but in the secondary sense that 
he shapes into new forms the material made ready to 
his hand. Browning has himself furnished us with a 
noble description of this office of the imagination : 


I find first 
Writ down for very A, B, C, of fact: 
‘«In the beginning God made heaven and earth,’ .. . 
Man—as befits the made, the inferior thing—... 
Repeats God's process, in man’s due degree, 
Attaining man’s proportionate result ; 
creates? No, but resuscitates perhaps. 
For such man’s feat is, in the due degree, 
Mimic creation, galvanism for life, 
But still a glory portioned in the scale. 

—The Ring and the Book, I: 706, 741. 


Still farther on, in the same work from which we have 
quoted, the author compares this manipulation of facts 
by the imagination to the adding of alloy when the gold 
is made into a ring. 

We must remember, however, that this creative func- 
tion is to be clearly distinguished from that power of 
the mind which merely recalls the past. The reproduc- 
'tive faculty is not simply the representative faculty. 
Imagination is not memory. Every woman can write one 
novel ; she remembers one story—her own—and she can 
tell that. But “the vision and the faculty divine” that 
‘Can evolve a hundred stories, all true to life and throb- 
bing with emotion, how rare a thing is this! Byron 
‘shows the narrowness of his creative powers, when 


380 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


everywhere, on the Alps or on the Rhine, in Greece or 
Spain or Italy, he sees only himself. Manfred and the 
Giaour, Childe Harold and Don Juan, are all Byron, under 
different names and various disguises. Not so with 
Shakespeare. The greatness of the master appears in 
nothing so much as in this, that in Shakespeare you see 
everybody and everything but Shakespeare himself. So) 
Browning hides his own personality. Only twice that. 
I remember in all his writings does he speak in his own 
name—first, in that magnificent tribute to his living 
wife, “One Word More”’; and, secondly, at the close of 
his introduction to “The Ring and the Book,” in which 
he almost apotheosizes his wife now dead. Browning 
deals with the xon-ego, not with the ego, in the sense of, 
self. 

I have called poetry the imaginative reproduction of 
the universe. - But I have not meant to limit the word 
“universe’”’ to its technical theological meaning. I have 
meant it to include all, even God himself. Only by) 
giving to the term this infinite sweep of significance) 
do we gain the proper conception of the dignity of 
poetry. It is nothing less than the reproduction A 
the imagination of all being, all beauty, all truth, in 
short of all things, visible or invisible. The high praises, 
of God are its noblest province, but all the world of 
finite things is its province also. To reproduce all this) 
to the imagination would require an infinite mind, and 
the result would be the poetry of the ages, the poetry) 
of eternity. 

If this: is the meaning of the word “universe,” then! 
it is certain that no mortal poet can compass it. Hence) 
the poet must make his choice; he must divide, in ord 









IMAGINATION REPRODUCES THE UNIVERSE 381 


to conquer. It is not to his discredit that he takes a 


j 


limited field, provided within those limits he “holds the 


mirror up to nature”’ and shows us the essential truth 


of things. In order to judge Browning justly then, we 


must ask what range he has assigned himself, and 
whether within that range he shows himself possessed 
of a great creative imagination. 

The most obvious thing to be said about Browning’s 


genius is that he is the poet, not of nature, but of man. 


Wordsworth was the poet of nature. To him the 
world was sacred, because symbolic and interfused with 
a divine element. The “light of setting suns,” and 
“the billows rolling evermore’’—these kindled his 


poetic imagination. 


The meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 
To me did seem 
Appareled in celestial light— 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 


Now all this affords the utmost contrast to Browning’s 


poetry. I doubt whether sentiments like these can be 


found in all the dozen solid volumes that bear his name. 


Browning and Wordsworth both deal with common 


things ; but Wordsworth treats of nature, Browning of 
life. The latter could adopt Pope’s line, “The proper 
study of mankind is man.’”’ And in the introduction to 
“ Sordello,” where our author has most clearly indicated 
the direction of his literary ambition, he says in plain 
prose: “‘My stress lay on the incidents in the develop- 
ment of a soul.” 

Again, Browning is the poet, not of events, but of 


thoughts. He cares not so much for the result as for 
the process—he describes, not so much incidents, as 
people’s impressions of them. Some might perhaps 
think that in the “Bringing of the Good News from 
Ghent to Aix’”’ we had at least one exception to this | 
rule; but even here the interest lies not so much in the | 
ride as in the rider; not so much in the redoubtable | 
steed as in the fiery determination that spurred him 
on; not so much in the deliverance itself as in them 
thoughts of the deliverer. Rarely, if ever, has this) 
writer's verse any tinge of the objective, much less of 
the epic. : 
On the other hand, he lets us into the secrets of the : 


382 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 





heart. As he sets before us “Bishop Blougram’s 
Apology” for holding great ecclesiastical preferments 
while all real faith in the doctrines he was set to defend) 
has gone out of him, we see “all the recesses and 
windings of an acute but mean and peddling little soul.” 
As we hear the duke calmly describe his villainous. 
treatment of “My Last Duchess,” it is difficult to say 
which we most shudder at, the speaker’s icy cruelty, or 
his unconsciousness of it. No poet has more clearly 
taught that “out of the heart are the issues of life,” | 
and that ‘“‘as a man thinketh, so is he.” No poet has. 
more powerfully depicted the self-perpetuating sin of | 
the thoughts, or has given more impressive illustrations / 
of the necessity of “bringing every thought into cap- 
tivity,” if we would make the least pretense to virtue. 
Once more, Browning’s poetry is not lyric, but dra- 

matic. He does not himself describe men’s thought 
but he makes men describe their own. In one of his | 
poems he rebukes a brother poet for “speaking naked | 


| 





; 
| 

} 
\ 





NOD LYRIC, “BUT -DRAMATIC 383 


thoughts, instead of draping them in sights and sounds.”’ 
In the “ Spanish Cloister,” the malicious, cursing monk 
involuntarily sets before us the character and life of the 


gentle and kindly brother whom he hates; so that, 
though the latter never utters a word for himself, the 
very cursing of his enemy becomes his justification and 
his monument. The little poem entitled ‘Confessions’ 


, 


contains a startling revelation of the heart. It is the 


last words of a dying man. He will have nothing to do 


with the clergyman who comes to give him spiritual 
consolation. He fastens his eyes on the medicine bot- 
tles upon the table, and his imagination turns even 


them into a picture of a darling sin of his youth, and 


gloats over the remembered transgression, even though 
the next moment is to usher him into the presence of 
God. 

_ All this reminds me of a historical incident related 
by Mrs. Charles in her book, entitled “ The Diary of 


Kitty Trevylyan.” John Nelson, the Methodist preacher 


of England, was converted by means of adream. He 
saw the great white throne set and the myriads gath- 
ered of earth and heaven. The Judge sat silent, but 
before him was an open book. Up to that book came 
one by one in long procession every soul of all mankind, 
and as each advanced he tore open his breast as a man 
would tear open the bosom of his shirt, and then com- 
pared his heart with the commandments written in the 
book. Not a word was said, nor did the Judge lift his 
finger, but each man, according as his heart agreed or 
disagreed with that perfect standard, went with joy to 
_the company of the saved, or in despair to the company 
of thedamned. Sin became its own detecter and judge 


384 THE POETRY OF BROWNING | 


and tormentor. So as we read Robert Browning we | 
become aware that a process of self-revelation is going — 
on. We seem to have naked souls before us. We look | 
into the heart of man and into the day of judgment. | 

Now, granting to our author his peculiar and chosen | 
department, namely, man ; his aspect of that segment | 
of the universe, namely, ‘ought; and, finally, his | 
method of treatment, the dvamatic ; we ask once more: | 
Is Browning a great creative genius? I think no one 
who has attentively and sympathetically read such poems 
as “ Karshish,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “The Flight of 
the Duchess,” “ Dzs Aliter Visum,” “The Statue and | 
the Bust,” “ By the Fireside,” “ Master Hugues,” “ Eve- | 
lyn Hope,” can refrain from answering in the affirma: 





tive. | 

But none of these, after all, give more than fragmen- ; 
tary evidences of his power. The greatest work of | 
Robert Browning is unquestionably “The Ring and 
the Book.” <A sort of personality invests this acknowl- 
edgment of mine, and I make it partly by way of 
reparation; for, fifteen years ago, I began to read this | 
production of the poet, but allowed myself to be 
daunted by the roughness and obscurity of its openings 
pages. I threw it down, determined to read no more, | 
For ten years I kept my vow. Beginning then with 
something easier, I found to my surprise that Browning | 
was comprehensible. A summer vacation devoted to) 
“The Ring and the Book” converted me to a qualified 
admirer of the poet. Now, after further study of his’ 
writings, I regard this poem as the greatest work of, 
creative imagination that has appeared since the time | 
of Shakespeare. | 





STRUCTURE OF “‘THE RING AND THE BOOK” = 3.85 


I wish to justify this statement, which to many will 
“seem so extraordinary. I can only do so by briefly 
describing “The Ring and the Book.” It is founded 
upon the story of an old Italian murder. Count Guido, 
after having passed his youth in the service of the pope 
and having failed to secure the advancement that he 
sought, determines in disgust to retire to his dilapidated 
castle and his ancestral estate. He bethinks him, how- 
ever, that an addition to his meagre income will be de- 
sirable, and he manages, with that end in view, to marry 
the reputed daughter of an aged and well-to-do couple 
of the middle class and to take her with him. Her 
parents follow her and, being ill-treated by him, leave 
his house in wrath. They then make known the fact 
that their reputed daughter is no daughter of theirs, but 
the offspring of a courtesan. 

Count Guido, in revenge, pursues toward his wife a 
course of relentless cruelty. He would drive her from 
him, yet in such a way as to throw the blame on her. 
A young priest is filled with pity for this double victim 
of avarice and malice—so young, so pure, so miserable 
—and he helps her to escape and to make her way to 
her so-called father’s house in Rome. Thither Count 
Guido pursues her, and on a certain Christmas eve 
‘bursts in with hired assassins and fatally stabs the 
father, the mother, and herself. The count is appre- 
hended, tried, and executed. 

It is this story upon which Browning has rung the 
changes in “The Ring and the Book.” First, we have 
the bare facts narrated—fourteen hundred lines. Sec- 
‘ondly, we have the story as one-half of Rome tells it, 


said one-half taking the part of the husband—fifteen 
Z 






386 THE POETRY OF BROWNING | 
hundred lines. Thirdly, what the other half of Rome | 
said, taking the side of the wife—seventeen hundred 
lines. Fourthly, Zertéam quid—what the few, the é2¢e, . 
the cultured, the cardinals, said—sixteen hundred lines. | 
Fifthly, what Count Guido himself said—two thousand | 
lines. Sixthly, what the brave priest said who fled with | 
the count’s wife—twenty-one hundred lines. Seventhly, - 
what the young wife herself said during the short hours _ 
between the attack and her death—eighteen hundred 
lines. Eighthly, what the counsel for the defense said 
at the trial—eighteen hundred lines. Ninthly, what 
the counsel for the prosecution said at that same trial— 
sixteen hundred lines. Tenthly, what the pope said, to: 7 
whom the case was referred for final decision—twenty- | 
one hundred lines. Eleventhly, what Count Guido said 
in prison before he was beheaded—twenty-four hundred 
lines. Twelfthly, what the world said when all was over 
—nine hundred lines. 
A most audacious and wearisome specimen of literary) 
trifling, the reader will be apt to say. Notso. Each 
new telling of the story adds new incident and sheds | 
new light. The effect is stereoscopic—you see the facts | 
from ever new points of view. Little by little the real) 
truth is evolved from the chaos of testimony ; little by; 
little the real motives of the actors become manifeddl 
As the process goes on you catch yourself speculating 
about each of the dramatis persone, as if he were a 
character in real life. The complexity of human mo-| 
tive, the wonderful interaction of character and circum. 
stance, the vastness of the soul, all these begin to dawn) 
upon you. Men are both better and worse than they. 
know; only God can judge the heart. I know of no 











THE IDEAL ELEMENT IN POETRY 387 


poem in all literature in which the greatness of human 


-hature so looms up before you, or which so convinces 


| 
| 
} 


you that a whole heaven ora whole hell may be wrapped 


up in the compass of a single soul. 


And as for the separate figures, I know not where to 
find characters more original or more distinct than that 
of Guido, with a selfishness that makes sun, moon, and 

Stars revolve about him, and when foiled turns to des- 
-perate malignity ; or Pompilia, the white lily grown out 
the horsepond scum, unstained even in the midst of 
cruelty and misery ; or Caponsacchi, the pleasure-loving 
‘soul turned to a hero by one resolve of daring and self- 
‘Sacrifice ; or the grand old pope, rounding out a just life 
and preparing to go before God’s judgment bar by doing 
one last act of justice and judgment upon earth. There 
are those who think this poem great only in its length, 





and it cannot be denied that it gives the impression of 
Inexhaustible fertility. But such critics can scarcely 
have read the poem through. The learning, the 
thought, the general conception—these are as remark- 
able as the length; and taking them all together, I am 
persuaded that the generations to come will regard 
“The Ring and the Book,” in the mere matter of 
creative genius, as the greatest poetical work of this 
generation. | 

| The strongest and most flattering thing that can be 
said about Robert Browning has been said already. 
We have found him to possess in an eminent degree 
the first and most important characteristic of the true 
20et, creative genius. But there is a second standard 
2 which he must be tried. Is the idealizing element 
is highly developed in him ? Poetry is the imaginative 





388 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


reproduction, not of the actual, but of the ideal unt 
verse. The great poet then must be able to idealize. 
His imagination, creative though it may be, must not 
find its affinities in the bad, the morally indifferent, or — 
the merely actual. It must hold high converse with | 
the true, the beautiful, and the good. The poet must 
be one of ) 


The immortal few 
Who to the enraptured soul and ear and eye 
Teach beauty, virtue, truth, and love, and melody, 


Let me make this plain by a few contrasts. Imagina- | 
tion is not enough to make a poet. I once had a class- | 
mate who had a vivid imagination—the trouble was that 
his imagination all ran to snakes. Of words descriptive 
of creeping and slimy things—centipedes, scorpions, | 
and toads—he had a rare supply; and the imaginative | 
power displayed in his occasional obj urgations was some- 
thing impressive. But I never called him a poet. 

Somewhat similarly there is an imagination that runs 
by instinct to the morally bad, that seems to love the 
low and the vile for its own sake; or, if not this, is pos- 
sessed with the notion—a notion born of a pantheistic | 
philosophy—that everything that zs has a sort of sacred-' 
ness and value, and therefore is to be faithfully repre- 
sented in literature. And so we have Zola’s studies of 
morbid anatomy, and his minute depicting of the fester- 
ing plague-spots of humanity. Of a somewhat better’ 
sort are the novels of Henry James—novels with no 
moral purpose ; novels, in fact, that scout a moral pur- 
pose as foreign to true art. Mr. James seems to fancy. 
that his business is simply to set before us studies of 





NOT A MERE REPRESENTATION OF LIFE 389 


actual society and manners: he would photograph modern 
|dife. 
| Now in contrast to all this tendency in our modern 
literature I stand for the thesis that poetry is not a 
mere representation of life. Preraphaelite studies of 
nature are not worthy the name of poetry. Art is not 
photography, and photography is not art. The ideal 
element must be seized and exhibited, or we have no 
poetry. We want to see the good in low surroundings, 
and we want to see the evil only as a foil and contrast 
to the good. “ Poetry,’’ as Ruskin has well said, “ pre- 
sents to us noble grounds for the noble emotions.”’ We 
seek in poetry for the essential truth and beauty that 
lie at the heart of things. Bluer skies than those of 
Italy, brighter wit than that of Sidney Smith, higher 
thought than that of Plato, these we seek and expect 
in poetry. We look to her to lift us from the dull 
realm of the actual into the “great air” of the ideal. 
Of Browning as an idealizer I cannot say so much as 
Isaid when I spoke of him as a creator. And yet a 
striking feature of his poetry is its recognition of this 
higher element in human life. To him all men are ina 
true sense ideal beings. There is a germ of greatness 
in every soul, continents that no Columbus has ever yet 
discovered, thoughts and motives, feelings and decisions, 
‘that possess interest beyond that of the whole material 
universe. Browning would not have chosen for his 
subject the soul of man if he had not sympathized with 
the dictum of Sir William Hamilton, “In the universe 
‘there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing 
great but mind.” 
Idealization, however, to be of any value, requires the 


390 THE POETRY OF BROWNING, 


possession of right standards of judgment. The poet 
therefore must be able to see things in large relations, 
discern the universal in the particular, catch glimpses 
of the absolute truth and beauty in its minor manifesta- 
tions. The greatest poetry is impossible except to a | 
great philosopher. I know what prejudices I am en- | 
countering here; still I believe that these prejudices | 
originate in a mistaken and narrow view of what poetry | 
is. If poetry is the imaginative reproduction of the | 
universe in its ideal relations, then nothing human, » 
nothing divine, can be foreign to the poet. He must | 
know psychology and ethics and politics and law; he | 
must know the physical sciences, and he must be a : 
theologian as well. Of course I do not mean that he 
must be a master in details; but this is certain, that | 
the great poets have possessed themselves of the sub- | 
stance of the knowledge of their times. And _ this | 
means that the great poet must be a man of broad | 
mind, of deep sympathy, a great thinker, and a great 
man. 

There are three things in particular which serve as | 
standards in all idealization, and which the great poet | 
must rightly apprehend. He must first of all have a / 
right view of human nature. He must believe in free- | 
dom and immortality. No great poet was ever a fatalist. | 
The poetry of mere fate denies man’s consciousness, | 
and fails to inspire. Emerson was better than his | 
philosophy when he wrote: 


So near’is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 

When duty whispers low, ‘‘ Thou must,”’ 
The youth replies, ‘‘I can.’’ 





FAITH IN FREEDOM AND IMMORTALITY 39I 


How different from this is the writing of George 
| ae with her exaggeration of heredity. To her, life is 
but the working out of inborn tendencies. Man may 
Mrugele and he may pray, but his nature is too much 
for him at last. Those who have seen Elihu Vedder’s 
illustrations of Omar Khayyam will remember the ever- 
recurring swirl that images human life; the many 
threads that come, no man knows whence, that go, no; 
man knows whither ; the gathering of these threads for 
a moment into the knot of human consciousness, and 
then the scattering of that consciousness forever. No 
wonder that at that center stands the wine cup. It is 
the old philosophy of the brute: “Let us eat and drink, 
for to-morrow we die.” 

Now I say that with such a conception as this there 
can be no proper idealization, and no poetry that will 
permanently touch the heart of man.. Life is not worth 
writing poetry about, for it has lost its dignity. The 
true poet believes less in environment, and more in will; 
less in heredity, and more in freedom. Charles Kingsley 
has said that the spirit of the ancient tragedy was “man 
conquered by circumstance,” while the spirit of the 
modern tragedy is “man conquering circumstance.” 
But this is only partly true. Even the ancient tragedy 
had its Prometheus, with unconquerable will asserting 
‘his freedom in spite of the thunderbolts and the vul- 
tures. 

And there is still more to be said. The thirst of con- 
science for reparation is the very essence of tragedy, 
whether ancient or modern. And this conscience wit- 
nesses to freedom in the past and to an immortality of 
Tetribution in the future. Poetry must take account of 


392 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


these facts in the nature of man, or it ceases to be 
poetry. Now we claim for Robert Browning that he 
recognizes them. In his pages we read of human | 
freedom. “Ixion” is a poem worthy, for its spirit and | 
its power, to be put side by side with the “Prometheus” | 
of AEschylus. In it the victim, bound to his iron wheel, | 
can still triumph over Jove. In “Pippa Passes,” the | 
innocent peasant girl trips in simple gladness from scene | 





to scene, singing as she goes: 


God's in his heaven, 
All’s right with the world, 


but her little song rouses conscience, makes vice seem 
hateful, reveals men to themselves. All unconsciously : 
to herself her words strike right and left, “(a savor of 
life unto life or of death unto death,” and the result is — 
two murders and three souls saved. I know of no poem 
since “Macbeth” that so portrays the agony of an 
awakened conscience. In this day of Hegelian revival, 
when moral evil and natural evil are confounded with 
each other, our literature needs to be invigorated by a) 
fresh breeze from Dante, by Shakespeare’s pictures of 
remorse, and by Robert Browning’s illustrations of the 
voluntariness and the damnableness of sin. 





If the poet must have proper views of human nature, | 
it is yet more important that he should have proper 
views of the divine. He must recognize the fact that | 
there is a God. <A poet of whom it can be said that 
“ God is not in all his thoughts,” has missed the greatest | 
thought of poetry, for “the greatest thought of the finite 
is the Infinite.” So Jean Paul has said, and Browning | 
would adopt his phrase. Our author’s writing is so full 





: 
) 


on Setebos 


FAITH IN PERSONALITY, RIGHTEOUSNESS, LOVE 393 


of this divine element that many a reader would fain 
call him a religious philosopher, if not a religious poet. 
We maintain that the highest poetry is impossible with- 
out religion, not only because the thought of God is the 
most sublime and fruitful of thoughts, but because from 
this loftiest thought all our lower thoughts take their 
proper measure and color. He who has no sense of 
God can never look at finite things in their right pro- 
portions. He who does not see in God an infinite per- 
sonality, righteousness, and love, can never interpret the 
world with its sorrow and its sin. 

Browning believes in the personality and righteous- 
ness and love of God. He is at war indeed with the 
anthropomorphism which would degrade God to the 
level of human appetites and passions. His “ Caliban 
" is a most scathing and convincing arraign- 
ment of superstitious and slavish worship. “The Epi- 
logue,” in which David stands as the type of the re- 


ligion that confines God to place, and Renan as the 
_ type of the skepticism that gazes sensuously into heaven 


until the last star of faith grows dim and disappears, 
ends with Browning’s own declaration of faith in an 


immanent Deity : 


That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my Universe that feels and knows. 


But that this is not pantheism, we are assured by other 
poems like “Saul,” in which, not content with an un- 
moral God, he declares that « All’s law, yet all’s love,” 


-and maintains that incarnation is the only true revela- 
tion. So Pompilia strikes the same note when she says: 


394 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


I never realized God's birth before— 
How he grew likest God in being born. 





‘« Ferishtah’s Fancies,” thought by some to be onlya | 
cellection of slight poems, seems to me to be one of | 
the most significant examples of the poet’s irresistible | 
tendency to the expression of religious ideas. In these | 
slight poems I find the following subjects successively | 
treated: 1. God works no unnecessary miracles. 2, | 
Let us give thanks for actual blessings, though much ; 
that we desire: may fail us. 3. Faith and love go 
together. 4. Pray on, though you see no answer to 
your prayers. 5. The purpose of suffering is purifica- - 
tion. 6. The punishment of sin is the dwarfing of nature. 
7. Asceticism fails of its own end. 8. Love must go 
before knowledge. 9. Life is worth the living. I think ; 
no one can read over this list without being convinced | 
that here is a poet who believes in God as well as in the 
soul. ! 

But there are also relations between man and God | 
upon which the poet must have definite opinions, if he | 
would idealize aright. I have already referred to | 
« Saul,” by way of evidence that Browning’s God is a 
personal God, a God of love, a God self-revealed and | 
brought down to our human comprehension in the in- | 
carnate Christ. I wish to speak of this same poem as | 
embodying the true idea of inspiration, and so in gen- | 
eral, of the communications of God to man. I speak | 
of this poem the more readily because it is perhaps the } 
most widely known and the most easily understood of | 
Browning’s longer productions—the fittest of all there- 
fore for a beginner to master. 4 





FAITH IN A REVELATION OF GOD TO MAN 395 


The title of the poem should be “ David,” rather than 
“Saul,” for the interest centers not in Saul’s hearing 
but in David’s song. .The shepherd boy has been 
brought from the sheepfold to chase away with music 
‘the abnormal and insane depression of Saul’s spirit. 
‘David sings of nature and her beauty, but Saul is not 
‘moved. He celebrates Saul’ s own heroic deeds, but 
there is no response. David rises in spirit as he sings ; 
in love he takes to himself Saul’s sorrow ; and, as he 
does so, a Spirit greater than his own takes possession 
of the singer; through his own love for his monarch, 
he is lifted up to understand something of the great 
love of God; his human sympathy becomes the vehicle 
of prophecy; in God himself he sees the desire to 
reveal himself in human form to men; he looks into the 
far future and cries, “ See the Christ stand!” 

Is there any other poem than this that more fully and 
truly expresses the method of divine inspiration? Here 
is a using of human faculties and powers, of human 
heart and -tongue, yet an elevation of all these to 
heights of understanding and expression which unaided 
humanity is powerless to reach. The supernatural uses 
the natural as its basis and starting-point, as its medium 
and vehicle ; but it transcends the natural, opening to 
it the far reaches of prophetic vision, and attuning it to 
the melody of a heavenly song. 
ba might speak of “A Death in the Desert,” an 
uttempt to depict the last hours of St. John, and to il- 
ustrate how human nature, fainting and failing as it is, 
can hospitably receive and faithfully express the mind 
ind will of the Spirit of God. But I find nowhere in 
Browning’s writings any intimation that the gift of in- 





396 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


ment of Christian men in general. He stops with the, 
faith that “holy men of old spake as they were moved 
by the Holy Ghost.” And yet the obscure and the 


spiration proper is to be confounded with the enlighten- 
weak may be God’s workmen still : 
| 


All service ranks the same with God— | 
With God, whose puppets best and worst | 
Are we: there is no last nor first. 


Alfred Tennyson has been called the religious poet 
of this century, apparently upon the ground of such 
poems as “The Two Voices,” “The Vision of Sin, 
and “In Memoriam.” I dislike to shock the cenci 
ties of Tennyson’s admirers; but I wish to record my 
belief that there is far more of a healthful religious 
spirit in Browning than in Tennyson. In the latte 
underneath the faith there is a generally hidden, but 
sometimes outcropping, skepticism; so that I should | 
hesitate to say whether his poetry had been quoted the. 
more by the prophets of faith or the prophets of unbe- 
lief. This cannot be said of Browning. I do not read) 
fragments of his writings in sermons preached for the | 
purpose of criticising or denouncing the old faith. [| 
do find him referred to in‘reverent discussions of the 
law and the attributes of God. | 

I am inclined to commend the reading of Robert 
Browning to all preachers and theologians, as well as to. 
all thoughtful Christian people. He is the most learned, | 
stirring, impressive literary teacher of our time—but he) 
is a religious philosopher as well. He has expressed. 
himself upon a larger variety of problems than | 
modern poet. He who would serve men’s highest in 

















| IS HIS POETRY ALWAYS SERIOUS? 397 


terests as secular or religious teacher, will find more of 
‘suggestion, more of illustration, more of stimulus, in 
Browning than in any modern writer. To quote again 
from Walter Savage Landor: “His is the surest foot, 
since Chaucer’s, that has waked the echoes from the 
difficult places of poetry and of life.” 

I cannot leave this general subject of Browning’s 
‘idealizing faculty without fairly considering two objec- 
tions to my doctrine, one directed against the serious- 
‘mess, and the other against the healthfulness of his 
poetry. I grant that there is at times an apparent 
levity. This may sometimes be merely a sign that he 
is consciously master of his theme—so fully master 
that he can play with it. The cat plays with the mouse 
she has caught—she does not care to play with the dog. 
But Browning himself has suggested a deeper and more 
‘constant reason than this. Hehas appropriated as motto 
for “ Ferishtah’s Fancies”’ what Collier in his edition of 
‘Shakespeare says of that great master: “His genius 
‘was jocular, but when disposed he could be very se- 
rious.” So we may say that it is the nature of Brown- 
ing’s genius to be jocular. 

Is jocularity incompatible with seriousness? “I am 
never merry when I hear sweet music,” says Jessica 
‘in “The Merchant of. Venice.” Why did Jesus never 
jest ? Would he have seemed to us possessed of a 
larger and truer humanity if the humorous element 
had appeared in him? It is common to say that our 
Lord’s unique work of suffering and death involved 
‘unique and soul-crushing burdens—for him to laugh 
would have been as incongruous as for us to laugh at a 
funeral. We sing, “He wept that we might weep.” 


398 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


Is it not equally true to say, “ He wept that we might 
smile’’? Since “ Believing, we rejoice vo see the curse} 
remove,’ may we not maintain that an unhindered de- 
velopment of all parts of our nature is first rendered’ 
possible by his death ? ! 

I think no one can doubt that there is a provision in| 
our nature for wit and jollity. Great men with great 
cares have solaced themselves with jests. We do not. 
think either Socrates or Abraham Lincoln the less Se 
rious because they were occasionally jocular. I will not ' 
venture to say that Browning is never guilty of seeming | 
irreverence; but that this seeming irreverence has a 
really profane intent would be hard to prove. In gen-| 
eral, I think it is rather the bubbling up of a deep effer- 
vescent spring. It is part of his idealizing faculty to” 
see things in their humorous relations. His jocularity, © 
though sometimes carried to an extreme, is part of the 
large-mindedness of the man. : 

And this opens the way to the discussion of the last 
objection. Is Robert Browning’s poetry healthful in its 
influence? We must grant that there is a certain free- | 
dom about its treatment of man’s physical instincts, | 
which now and then may offend critics of the Tenny. 
sonian school. There is no asceticism in Browning, | 
He does not attempt to do without the body, as Shel- | 
ley did. But neither does he deify the body, as Swin- 


ee a ee ee ac 





burne does. Mens sana in corpore sano is his motto. 
He believes in food and drink—but in food and drink 
mainly as means, not as ends. If he ever speaks of | 
sensuous things with something of Elizabethan frank: ’ 
ness, we must remember that there isa mock modesty — 
more akin to vice than is innocent freedom of speech, 











IS HIS POETRY ALWAYS HEALTHFUL? 399 


I find in Browning true sentiment without a tinge of 
| sentimentality. 

! John Stuart Mill once defined sentimentality as “a 
‘setting of the sympathetic aspect of things above their 
gesthetic aspect, or above the moral aspect of them— 
their right or wrong.” This was the fault of the early 
novels, like Richardson’s ‘ Clarissa,’ which drew such 
mens of tears from our great-great-grandmothers, but 
whose sickly and maudlin sentiment we only make 
‘Merry over to-day. Now I think it a great tribute to the 
healthfulness of Robert Browning’s poetry, and so to his 
‘power of true idealization, when I say that, as for this 
mawkish sentimentality, he will have none of it. 
Wordsworth would have come nearer to being one of the 
‘greatest poets if he had not lacked one of his senses— 
not one of the five senses, but that sixth, most impor- 
tant sense—the sense of the ludicrous. Browning’s sense 
of the ludicrous stands him in good stead. He cannot 
‘be commonplace, he cannot be nonsensical, he cannot be 
affected, he cannot be sentimental. Our young people 
will get good from reading such poems as Dis Aliter 
Visum, because Browning does not believe that true 
love is an unreasoning impulse, but rather regards it as 
subject to judgment and conscience. 

Passion is not its own justification; the sympathies 
are under law to reason; feeling should have a basis 
in fact—these are truths which greatly need to be 
taught to our easy-going, pleasure-loving time; and no 
one has taught them so well as Browning. Out of his 
books there blows a healthful breeze, as from the woods 
and the hills, to brace up and reinvigorate a literature 
‘that was fast becoming finical and dilettante. And I 


think I am not mistaken in saying that much of the 
modern progress toward direct and sensible speech, both — 
in the pulpit and in the press; much of the new sim- 
plicity and vigor which differences our talk from the 
bookish conversations of Walter Scott’s novels; aye, | 
much of the condensation and energy of recent Eng- | 
lish poetry, as compared with the long-winded wearl | 
someness of Wordsworth, is to be attributed to thes; 
healthful influence of Robert Browning. 

Browning is greatest as a creative genius; less great | 
as an idealizer; least great asa literary artist. We have 
said that poetry is an imaginative reproduction of the | 
universe in its ideal relations and an expression of these 
relations in rhythmical literary form. It is this standard | 
of artistic form by which we have still to try our poet, | 
Artistic form is of two sorts, or rather involves two _ 
elements: first, an element of construction; and Sec. 
ondly, an element of rhythmical and musical expression. 
In considering the constructive element, we must remem- | 
ber that true poetry, like true science, puts before us not. 
merely facts, but facts in their relations. In a great) 
poem we want, not the materials of poetry, but an or. 
ganic structure ; not bricks, but a house. Itisa serious | 
question whether that can be a great poem which com- | 
pels the reader to do the poet’s work. I do not attempt | 
just here to decide the question ; I only suggest it with | 
the view of adducing an argument or two upon each 
side and then leaving the reader to judge for himself. | 

For all ordinary purposes and in all ordinary kinds of, 
pages the world has come to accept Herbert Spen- | 
cer’s principle of style,—a contribution to human knowl-. 
edge, by the way, of more value and longer to be re 


400 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 
j 
: 
| 
| 
} 


—_ 


——- — 






| 








THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN POETRY 401 


membered than all the rest of his philosophy,—I mean 
the principle of ‘economy of the reader’s or hearer’s at- 
tention. ” Given in the auditor, for example, a certain 
amount of intellectual and emotional energy, then the 
less of this energy expended in grappling with the mere 
form of an address, the more there will be left to seize 
upon the substance. Hence the wisdom of making the 
drapery as thin as possible, that the real form may be the 
better seen. Avoid all involution and remote allusion 
that will hinder the hearer from getting at the sense. 
Let the phrase of your essay be so simple that he who 
Tuns may read. So order your material that it unfolds 
most easily and naturally, each new sentence adding 
some point of interest, and all tending to a climax of 
thought and of expression. 

This is the art of putting things. The French excel 
in it. Every great teacher is in this respect a literary 
artist. He knows how to organize his matter so as to 
produce the most rapid, comprehensive, and powerful 
impression. And this is the first thing pointed out in 
Milton’s description of true poetry: “Simple, sensuous, 
dassionate.”’ 

Now it is agreed by all that Browning is often ob- 
scure, and that this obscurity resides not alone in the 
bingle phrase or verse, but also in the whole arrange- 
nent of his material. The reader often begins, as I 
myself began, with unprepossessed and even favorable 
mind, only to find that unexplained allusions throng 
jpon him; clues are presented which, being tracked 
but, seem to lead no-whither; in fact, a labyrinth seems 
‘0 be the only comparison that fits the poem. Grave 


loubts suggest themselves either of the poet’s sanity 
: 2A 





402 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


or of our own. Or is he trifling with us? The average 
reader concludes at any rate that what it is not worth 
Mr. Browning’s while to make intelligible, it is not worth | 
his own while to read. The very multiplicity of ques. 
tions that suggest themselves at every turn, and that. 
make so lively the meetings of the Browning clubs, are) 
an offense to the man who does not love to think much) 
as he reads. | 

I know of no author, ancient or modern, the mention) 
of whose name just now excites more violent dispute, 
Certain it is that Browning divides the world. There 
are two hostile camps. If he is not of all poets the. 
best loved by his friends, he is surely the best hated by 
his foes. Indeed it is almost amusing to hear one who) 
has been cheered, in beginning Sordello, by the 
author’s assurance: “Who will, may hear Sordello’s, 
story told,” and then has floundered through what he, 
cannot but regard as a medizval literary morass—I say, 
it is amusing to hear such a one describe the indigna- 
tion with which at the close of the poem he read the, 
words: “ Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told.” » 

It is only fair, however, to listen to Browning’s de 
fense. His method, he would say, is the true method, | 
because it is the method of life. Suppose you go down 
the street to morrow morning, and as you go, perceive. 
in the distance a great crowd stretching from curb to 
curb, There are excitement, and hurried ejaculations, 
and much rushing to and fro. You draw near and ask) 
some person upon the periphery of the circle what it is. 
all about. He gives you the curt and fragmentary an-) 
swer, “ Murder,” and then turns from you. You press 
your way inward, questioning others as you can, until 


| 
| 
{ 
: 











AN EXPLANATION OF HIS OBSCURITY 403 


gradually there rises in your mind the structure of a 
story; hints which at first you could not understand 
begin to be interpreted; you modify first impressions 
by subsequent information : by the time you have 
reached the center of the ae a whole tragedy of 
love, and jealousy, and crime, and death, has been en- 
acted in your brain. 

Compare this way of getting at the story with the 
other way of reading about it all in the evening paper 
of that same day. Which of these ways most rouses 
your thinking powers, most excites your interest and 
sympathy? Can any one doubt that it is the former? 
Now this is Browning’s method. He thrusts us into the 
turmoil of life and compels us to construct the story for 
ourselves. He gives us facts, but only in a fragmentary 
way. What is said becomes fully intelligible only in 
the light of further knowledge. What is the result ? 
Why this: you become a judicial personage, and weigh 
vidence, as the case unfolds before you. You become 
yourself a poet, a creator, and when you have done, you 
‘eel that the poem is a thing of life, that you have your 
ywn hard-earned conception of it, that it is your poem 
is well as Browning’s. 

_ All this is best illustrated in the case of “The Ring 
ind the Book.” As those twenty-two thousand lines 
vass before your eyes, your first impulse is to give up 
he investigation—the case is too complicated, and life is 
hort. But keep on, and the story gets a hold upon 
fou; the characters become instinct with life ; each new 
‘Spect of the case is like a new revelation; the whole 
“oem becomes a mighty living structure, ee within 
vheel, the fit type and representative of the life of hu- 


i 
| 


404 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


and seized from beneath by the powers of hell. Wher 
you have read y ou can call it «A ring without a posy 
and that, mzne.’ In this very sense of possessior 
which Browning’s poems awaken, I see the secret of the 
intense interest he excites in those who have the patience 
and the grace to read him. If we have to eat our owr 
bread in the sweat of our brow, Browning would sa} 
that this is precisely what he has been aiming at; with’ 
out exercise we should have no appetite, no enjoymay 
of our food, no profit from the eating of it. 

I confess that this view of the case has much to sa} 
for itself. Certainly the best poetry is not that which 
yields its full meaning at the first cursory reading. @ 
absolute intelligibility to a half-roused mind be the tes 
of poetry, much of what we call the best is no poetr) 
at all. No, aman cannot understand the best poetr 
without being something of a poet; even as he canno: 
appreciate Mont Blanc without looking at it from som 
neighboring height. The best poetry of Shakespear 
or even of Tennyson is not mastered except by repeatet 
reading ; it takes years, and maturity indeed, before thi 
full glory of some great passages dawns upon us. q 

Browning compels us to work for our intellectua 
living more perhaps than any other modern poet, bu 
there is always the comfort of knowing that there is_ 
real pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, and tha 
there is a definite place where the rainbow ends. Id 
not think that Browning is obscure for the mere sake ¢ 
obscurity; what obscurity there is is a part of his art 
whether the principle upon which it rests is ill-judger 
or not. And, with practice, the obscure becomes plain 


manity moved upon from above by angelic influence 
) 
, 
4 














IS THE EXPLANATION SUFFICIENT? 405 


In fact I find that the objection upon the score of ob- 
scurity is urged less and less, as the reader becomes 
‘more and more familiar with Browning’s method. He 
expects it, he sees the object of it, he is stimulated by 
it, he ends by becoming a qualified admirer of it, just 
as he admires the twilight and the growing splendor of 
ithe stars. 

_ Thus I have presented with all fairness the considera- 
ns pro and con, so far as respects the constructive 
element in Browning’s poetry. I wish I could sum up 
and give the verdict squarely upon the side of the poet. 
‘This I fear I cannot do. I could do so if I did not 
recognize certain “unexplored remainders” in his writ- 
ings, the meaning of which I have some doubt whether 
even Browning himself ever knew. In “ Ferishtah’s 
Fancies” there are certain lines printed in the original 
‘Hebrew ; this looks to me mischievous, if not malicious. 
A noted Greek professor said that he could understand 
Browning’s translation of the “ Agamemnon,” if he were 
only permitted to use the original as a “ pony.” 

_ Ihave always thought it doubtful whether the Romans 
understood their own great poets at first reading. I 
have some sympathy with the man who declared that if 
the Latins had had to learn their own language, they 
would have had no time to conquer the world. But 
there is seldom what you may call willful and needless 
obscurity in the classic poets. Their condensed and 
nervous speech was meant to pack things in for pres- 
ervation ; and it is no wonder that the original package 
sometimes takes time to untie. So Browning means to 
sack his thought. Mrs. Orr tells us that it was a re- 
oroachful note of Miss Caroline Fox that determined 


eee 


. 


406 THE POETRY OF BROWNING | 
him nevermore to use an unnecessary word. Would 
that he had added the determination perfectly to or 
ganize his material before he began to write. 

While I see in Browning an untold wealth of resource, 
a mind most eager for expression, a power to recognize) 
truth in its secret hiding-places, I see also an occasional 
lack of judgment as to what is valuable and what is 
merely curious, and a lack of constructive power to 
make the most of the matter that is chosen. He seems, 
at times content with first drafts, willing to put down) 
out of a teeming mind what first comes to hand, and) 
ready to say, upon objection made, that if the reader 
cannot understand it, so much the worse for the reader, 
Here he is something less than a great literary artist, 
for true art is intelligible, and no unintelligible poem) 
can ever become immortal. | 

I cannot leave this part of my subject without putting, 
something of the poet’s least intelligible verse side by 
side with something of his simplest and best. I know 
few passages more difficult as to form, yet more noble 


for depth and insight, than this one from “The Ring, 
and the Books. 








God breathes, not speaks, his verdicts, felt not heard—_ 
Passed on successively to each court I call : | 
Man’s conscience, custom, manners, ail that make | 
More and more effort to promulgate, mark | 
God's verdict in determinable words, ! 
Till last come human jurists—solidify | 
Fluid results—what’s fixable lies forged, 
Statute—the residue escapes in fume, 

Yet hangs aloft a cloud, as palpable 

To the finer sense as word the legist welds. 





1 <The Ring and the Book,’’ I : 255 sg. 





RHYTHMICAL AND MUSICAL EXPRESSION 407 


Justinian’s Pandects only make precise 
What simply sparkled in men’s eyes before, 
| Twitched in their brow or quivered on their lip, 
| Waited the speech they called, but would not come. 


Yet this passage is obscure to many merely because 
the thought is profound. To such let us commend 
“The Martyr’s Epitaph,’ in which Browning shows 
himself capable of a simplicity and grandeur unsur- 
passed in English poetry: 


Sickly I was, and poor and mean,— 
A slave ; no misery could screen 
The holders of the pearl of price 
From Ceesar’s envy ; therefore twice 
I fought with beasts, and thrice I saw 
My children suffer by his law. 
At length my own release I earned ; 
I was some time in being burned, 
But at the last a hand came through 
The flame above my head, and drew 
My soul to Christ, whom now I see. 
| Sergius, a brother, wrote for me 
This testimony on the wall ; 

For me—I have forgot it all. 

— Laster Day, 275-288. 





The truest artistic form requires something more than 
the constructive element— it implies also the element of 
‘rhythmical and musical expression. The good and true 
‘must be married to the beautiful. This marriage cer- 
tainly seems made in heaven, for nothing more surprises 
the poet than the leaping from his brain of thought 
and word together—wedded from their birth. In this 
‘Matter of melodious expression the poets differ more 
than in almost anything else. We modern and English- 


408 THE POETRY OF BROWNING : 


speaking people owe, in this respect, a great debt ‘' 
Shelley. I find in him a “linked sweetness long drawn | 
out,” that Milton himself was never master of, and that) 
Swinburne has sought, but with weaker intellectual | 
powers, to copy. It is a wonder that, with Browning’s 
passionate admiration of Shelley, he has in his own | 
writing so little of Shelley’s distinguishing excellence, 
In this mastery of melodious expression, Elizabeth, 
Barrett Browning is greatly the superior of her husband, | 
Compare “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” with the 
‘Flight of the Duchess”’; compare “My Kate” with: 
“The Lady of Tripoli,’ and you cannot help seeing 
that the wife puts into her verse a delicate sweetness) 
and a tremulous emotion which the husband can never) 





equal. | 

Indeed, for a reason already suggested when I spoke. 
of defects of construction, Robert Browning aims of) 
to be an emotional poet. And here let us do him justice, | 
as we can only do by looking at the matter from his: 
peculiar point of view. Browning found the literary) 
world well-nigh enslaved to a poetry in which sense was) 
sacrificed to sound, in which melody of phrase took the: 
place of thought, in which mere sweetness covered a 
multitude of sins of vagueness and rhapsody and in-) 
anity. You could read such poetry when half asleep, | 
and you were quite asleep when you were done. Brown-) 
ing thought such writing beneath the dignity of the poet. | 
No “Airy, fairy Lillians”’ would he write. His poetry) 
should carry no one to heaven on flowery beds of ease.’ 
Men’s minds should be alert, if they read him at all. 
Hence his brusque air, his harsh turns, his scorn for the, 


merely sensuous and quieting, his startling us from’ 








RHYTHMICAL AND MUSICAL EXPRESSION 409 


dreams into sense. A little poem of his illustrates 
this : 
Verse-making was least of my virtues : I viewed with despair 
Wealth that never yet was but might be—all that verse-making 
were 

If the life would but lengthen to wish, let the mind be laid bare. 
So I said ‘‘To do little is bad, to do nothing is worse’? — 

And made verse. 


Love-making—how simple a matter! No depths to explore, 

No heights in a life to ascend! No disheartening before, 

No affrighting hereafter—love now will be love evermore. 

So I felt «‘To keep silence were folly—all language above,”’ 
I made love. 


{ 


It reminds me of an out-of-door play of my early 
days which bore the name of “Snap the whip.” A 
long line was formed of boys taking hold of hands, the 
biggest and strongest boy at one end of the line, the 
smallest and most unsuspecting at the other, many fine 
gradations between. The game was to swing the line 
around with the big boy for a center, and to swing it 
around with such momentum that the little boy at the 
small end should be thrown off like a comet from the 
solar system. It was fine fun for the big boy; for the 
little one it meant the general demoralization of his 
attire and the breaking of his head against the fence. 
‘Many a time, as I have read Robert Browning and have 
been hurled off into vacancy by one of his sudden 
iturns, I have felt like the little boy in “Snap the whip.” 
It is all very well for Mr. Browning, but how about the 
unsophisticated reader? Is it possible for him to escape 
a certain sense of injury? 

_ Emotion, music, grace—these are not so native to 
Robert Browning as thought. The philosopher often 


410 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


overtops the poet. His harshness is not all to be par. 
doned upon the plea that it is a higher kind of art. 
Much of it is to be accounted for only upon the ground | 
that “it is his nature to.” Verse is not quite sponta- 
neous with him. John Stuart Mill’s conception of God * 
is somewhat similar. The imperfections of the uni- 
verse, he thinks, argue either lack of love or lack of} 
power in the Supreme Intelligence ; he prefers to doubt | 
the power rather than to doubt the love. God does the 
best he can, but he has to work with very intractable 
material. And so Mill speaks of God as if he were! 
some weak old man trudging up-hill with a mighty bur- 
den which he cannot easily manage, which, in fact, he | 
is Just able to carry—a shocking representation of him | 
whom we know to be infinite in power as well as infi- ' 
nite in love. I have sometimes thought that the repre. 
sentation was an excellent one of merely earthly crea- | 
tors—and of none more so than of Browning. His. 
material at times seems too much for him. The metal * 
is not hot enough to run freely into poetic molds; the | 
metal is of the best ; but the power to shape it into per- 
fect forms—the highest measure of this is lacking. | 

In Italy they have a peculiar way of cooking and | 
serving that pretty little bird, the ortolan. It is trans } 
fixed with a skewer, but upon the skewer are aiso put | 
a piece of brown toast upon the one side, a sage-leaf | 
upon the other. So came, in thick succession, sage ' 
leaf, ortolan, toast, sage-leaf, ortolan, toast, repeated as | 
many times as need be. Browning likens his writing 
very justly to the combination of these three. The ° 
ortolan represents the poetry; the sage-leaf furnishes | 
piquancy ; the brown toast is nothing but sound sense, | 


i 


oe le ieee ~ 





PALLIATIONS OF HIS HARSHNESS 411 


[admire his candor—few poets are so frank. My only 
‘fear is that at times when ortolans were scarce and 
thin, Browning may have made up for their lack by put- 
ting two sage leaves in place of one, and by indefinitely 
increasing the size and thickness of the brown toast. 

I would not indulge myself, however, nor would I 
advise my younger readers to indulge, in the calm super- 
ciliousness with which many intelligent people still treat 
Robert Browning. It is not wise to assume that so 
steadily growing a fame and so marked an influence 
upon current literature are without any just foundation. 
It is best to take account of the forces of our time; we 
cannot afford to be ignorant of them. The youth who 
postponed his crossing of the stream until the water 
should flow by had to wait foralong time. So, it seems 
to me, the man who regards what he calls “the Browning- 
cult” as a merely temporary craze “exspectat, dum de- 
Jluit amnis.’ Those who know most of Browning are 
rather inclined to say of him as Isocrates said of Hera- 
cleitus : «What I know of him is so excellent that I 
can draw conclusions from it concerning what I cannot 
understand.” 

And one can say all this without for a moment sur- 
rendering his powers of critical judgment. He only 
insists that wisdom does not exclude wonder, and that 
we live, as intellectual and spiritual beings, only by “ad- 
miration, hope, and love.”’ The z2/ admirari spirit is the 
spirit of decrepitude and death, and faith in great men 
is next to faith in God. I would not have Robert 
Browning’s defects of artistic form blind any of my 
readers to the broad humanity of the poet and his ideal 
pictures of the deep thoughts of man’s heart. No poet 


| 
| 


AI2 THE POETRY OF BROWNING 


of this century is more widely learned, no poet has more | 
carefully pondered the great problems of existence, no | 
poet has uttered more important truth. | 

There is, of course, a higher poetry than his, a poetry > 
of wider range, of sweeter sound, of deeper spiritual 
significance. As civilization goes on, imagination will 
not fall into disuse, but will reach a higher development. 
To believe otherwise is to fancy that an inalienable pre- 
rogative of the human soul can be sloughed off as a) 
mere excrescence, or can dwindle till it ceases to ba 
No, imagination belongs to man; and, as with advance- | 
ing ages man’s range of vision widens, imagination will 
only be furnished with larger and nobler materials, will . 
only have deeper insight into the ideal relations of the | 
universe, will only grow in power to express the truth. | 
With larger truth will come deeper emotions, and with 
deeper emotions will come greater perfection of artistic 
form. 

If there were only as much of us at all times as there 
is at some times, and if power of expression only an- | 
swered always to the heart’s desire, living would be a. 
delight and earth would be heaven. I take the very) 
sense of imperfection in all poetry of the past as an 
incentive to look forward. I not only anticipate no de | 
cline of poetry, but I confidently predict a day when, : 
under the influence of a diviner Spirit than any earthly | 
Muse, poetry shall be the chief handmaid of religion, 
the incarnate God shall be its chief subject, and the 
poet shall undertake ‘things unattempted yet in prose | 
or rhyme.” I look for a grander poetry here on earth—_ 
but I am not content with this; I want all God’s sons » 
and daughters to prophesy ; I trust we shall all be poets | 


a 


BROWNING AS THE POET OF OPTIMISM 413 
















in the New Jerusalem ; I long for the great future when 
the soul can fully express herself, when form shall an- 
-swer to spirit, when language shall be the perfect vehicle 
of thought, and when all speech shall be song. 


I] 


In the charming “‘ Memoirs of Caroline Fox,” we are 
told that Carlyle once entertained Emerson by taking 
him at midnight through the London slums. After he 
had shown his friend some more than common speci- 
‘mens of depravity, the sage of Chelsea blurted out in 
his cynical way: ‘Do you believe in a devil now?” 
But the calm American only replied: “I am more and 
more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the 
English people.” It is an illustration of the tendencies 
to pessimism on the one hand, and to optimism on the 
other, that divide the world between them. In Ger- 
‘many, Schopenhauer looked at life through glasses dim 
with the smoke of the pit, while to Fichte a roseate 
‘mist suffused and glorified every dark and hateful thing. 
The pessimists, like the poor, we have always with us ; 
but in literature it is only the optimists who have last- 
ing power and attraction. The true poet must be a 
‘sort of prophet—a believer in the divine presence and 
‘purpose in all things, and therefore confident and for- 
ward-looking, like the prophets of Israel. 

Robert Browning was the greatest optimist of the 
century, and his optimism constituted his chief message 
‘to our generation. In a pessimistic age, when the winds 
were laden with wailing, he preached a gospel of cheer 
and hope. He did this persistently and courageously, 


414 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


in spite of the fact that the age had its strong influence 


upon him. In his later days even he became involved 


in the toils of a pessimistic philosophy, and that to the 


great detriment of his poetry. Yet the optimistic faith 
and impulse of his early years remained to the last and 
asserted themselves in spite of speculative difficulties, 


The withes of the Philistines could not long bind this | 


Samson, and, even when old and blind, he could summon 
up his strength and confound his enemies. 

It was largely a matter of temperament. When 
Henry Ward Beecher was asked whether life was really 


worth living, he replied that it depended very much 


upon the liver. It was not wholly without reason that 
the ancients located the affections in that particular 
portion of the body. Pessimism and optimism are to a 
considerable extent matters of digestion. The dyspep- 
tic takes dark views of the universe around him, while 


youth and health see all things bright and fair. Brown- | 


ing certainly began his career with a fine physical endow- 


ment, and though some of his later philosophical aber- 


rations have been laid to the account of ill-health, I can — 


testify that, so recently as 1887, when I saw him in his 
scarlet gown among the dons at the Oxford Commem- 


oration, he seemed the picture of a sound mind in a | 


sound body. The twinkle of humor in his eye and the 
air of sagacity and comfort in his whole manner indi- 
cated that there was no place in him for mawkish senti- 
ment. There is a story that Swinburne, when he first 
met Browning, refused to take the chair that was 


\ 


offered him, and insisted upon sitting upon a hassock at + 
the master’s feet. The story goes on to relate that | 
when Swinburne took his departure the master indulged 





, PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES 415 














in what the lower classes of London call “language.” 
Carlyle once said of Browning: “There’s a great con- 
trast between him and me. He seems very content 
with life, and takes much satisfaction in the world. It’s 
avery strange and curious spectacle to behold a man in 
these days so confidently cheerful.” If something of 
this cheer was due to native temperament, a part was 
attributable to the fact that he constantly mingled with 
men. In this respect we may contrast him with Tenny- 
son. As compared with Browning, Tennyson was a 
recluse. Self-conscious and morbidly sensitive to what- 
ever voices were rife around him, he came to be a praiser 
of the time that was past, and a somewhat morose critic 
of the present. One has only to read «“ Locksley Hall”’ 
and then to read “ Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” to 
perceive that the tender grace of a day that was dead 
could never come back to Lord Tennyson. He who 
shuts himself out from his kind comes to distrust his 
kind. Browning believed in humanity, in large part be- 
cause he was ex rapport with humanity. 

Yet we must go deeper than this. Every man is a 
product of his time. Larger influences than those. of 
his own health and environment make him what he is. 
There are streams of tendency that come down from the 
past. The atmosphere of thought owes its temperature 
and quality to distant seas and to other lands. The 
Puritans had so exalted God as to leave no place for 
man, and there had been a natural reaction. Deism 
had come in, with its “absentee God, sitting idle ever 
‘since the first sabbath at the outside of the universe 
and seeing it go.’’ Sensationalism had come in, with 
its derivation of our sublimest ideas from sense, and its 


416 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 






consequent failure to see dignity in anything. But the | 
first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a change. — 
Whatever else the German transcendental philosophers — 
did do or did not do, they showed that there are ele- | 
ments in knowledge which are not furnished by the | 
senses. Kant proved that there may be, Hegel proved . 
that there must be, being to which our knowledge cor-_ 
responds. In other words, we can get at Reality. It 
was the rediscovery of God in his universe. | 

The wave of German thought swept over to England. 
Shelley, in his “ Adonais,” saw God in nature, though 
he could not pronounce the sacred name, and even called | 
himself an atheist : 


es 


a 


The One remains, the many change and pass ; | 
Heaven's light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass q 
Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
Until death tramples it to fragments. 


world, more than in the matchless melody of his verse, I | 
find the explanation of Browning’s apotheosis of Shelley 
in his “Sordello.” Wordsworth also saw God in 
nature—his insistence upon a personal intelligence and_ 
love in even the meanest flower that blows constitutes | 
the chief merit and charm of his poetry. 

But here Shelley and Wordsworth stopped. Shelley 
felt that he was at war with the world of mankind and | 
the world of mankind at war with him. He would 
have pulled down the existing order of society, if only 
he could have done it. And Wordsworth, in spite of 
his theoretical recognition of God in all things, was at 


| 
| 
| 
| 
And in this recognition of the divine principle in the 








PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES Ale 






aome only when he got “far from the madding crowd.” 
Men were lawless, and the divine in them was hard to 
‘ecognize. I cannot better express my conception of 
Browning’s place in literature than by saying that he 
degins where Shelley and Wordsworth leave off—begins 
dy finding God in nature and ends by finding God in 
man. listen to “ Paracelsus”: 


The center fire heaves underneath the earth, 
And the earth changes like a human face ; 

The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, 
Winds into the stone’s heart, outbranches bright 
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, 
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask— 
God joys therein. The wroth sea’s waves are edged 
With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, 
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups 

Of young volcanoes come up, cyclops-like, 
Staring together with their eyes on flame— 

God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. 
Then all is still ; earth is a wintry clod ; 

But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
Over its breast to waken it ; rare verdure 

Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between 

The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, 
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face. 


Above, birds fly in merry flocks ; the lark 

Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; 

Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing-gulls 

Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 

Of nested limpets ; savage creatures seek 

Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews 
His ancient rapture. Thus he dwells in all, 
From life’s minute beginnings, up at last 

To man—the consummation of this scheme 


Of being, the completion of this sphere of life. . . 
2B - 


418 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


And man produced, all has its end thus far ; 
But in completed man begins anew ~ 
A tendency toward God. 















In these last lines the poet goes far beyond Shelley | 
or Wordsworth. Browning sees God, not only in- 
nature, but in the soul. He has been called the “sub 
tlest asserter of the soul in song.” In his main poems, 
indeed, he finds his subjects in the struggles, aspirations, 
triumphs, of the soul. He believes in spirit. In “The 
Ring and the Book,” the Pope says: ‘Mind is not | 
matter, nor from matter, but above”; and, in one of - 
his most characteristic poems, he writes : | 


Quoth a young Sadducee, ‘‘ Reader of many rolls, 
Is it so certain we have, as they tell us, souls ?’’ 

«Son, there is no reply’’ ; the rabbi bit his beard ; 
«Certain, a soul have I—we may have none,’’ he sneered, 
Thus Karshook, the Hiram’ s-hammer, 

The Right-hand Temple-column, 
Taught babes in grace their grammar, 
And struck the simple solemn. 


Yet Browning is a pronounced evolutionist. He finds | 
it difficult to maintain an absolute difference between | 
the organic and the inorganic, so long as every plant is 
turning the one into the other ; and, so long as man by | 
eating animal food is turning the brute into himself, he | 
finds it difficult to assert an absolute difference between | 
himself and the brute. The same principle which mani | 
fests itself in matter manifests itself in a higher form 1 > 
spirit. Evolution is only the name of a process. ‘Teh 
leaves the question of agency still unsolved. Both evo: 
lution and law are modes of action—the action of a 


PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES 419 

















piritual Being who reveals himself in both matter and 
lind. 

The poet’s idealism makes all this easier to him. “To 
now,” he says in “ Paracelsus,” 


To know 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without. 


Thus his evolutionism, instead of lowering man, ele- 
ates nature. Matter cannot explain spirit, for matter 
unnot be understood except as a manifestation of spirit, 
else as an element in the spiritual world. As we look 
pon the ascending scale of being, shall we take as 
le principle of explanation the beginning or the end? 
vidently the latter. “The oak explains the acorn, 
ren more truly than the acorn explains the oak.” 
/e say, therefore, of the spiritual activities of man: 
This is what the crude beginning in nature really was. 
‘an, with his higher ideas, shows the meaning and con- 
mt of all that led up to him.” Here is genuine poetic 
sight. Let me illustrate it first by a quotation from 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau”” : 


For many a thrill of kinship I confess to 

With the powers called Nature, animate, inanimate, 
In parts or in the whole ; there’s something there 
Manlike, that somehow meets the man in me. 


nd then by several brief quotations from “ Paracelsus” 


Man, once descried, imprints forever 
His presence on all lifeless things. 


420 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


A supplementary reflex of light 
Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains 
Each back-step in the circle. 


The winds 
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, 
Never a senseless gust, now man is born. 
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, 
A secret they assemble to discuss 
When the sun drops behind their trunks. 


The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops 
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour, 
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn 
Beneath the warm moon, like a happy face. 








I knew, I felt (perception unexpressed, 
Uncomprehended by our narrower thought, 
But somehow known and felt in every shift 
And change in the spirit—nay, in every pore 
Of the body even)—what God is, what we are, 
What life is—how God takes an infinite joy 
In infinite ways—one everlasting bliss, 

From whom all being emanates, all power 
Proceeds. 


’ 
| 
| 
H 
| 


Comte declared that science would conduct God tc 
the frontier of his universe, and politely bow him out, witk 
thanks for his provisional services. But Browning holds 
rather with Lord Bacon, that while “a little philosophy 
inclineth man’s mind to atheism,” “depth in philosophy 
bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For, while the 
mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, i! 
may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but 
when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate anc 
linked together, it must needs fly to Providence ant 





INTERPRETS NATURE BY MAN 421 


Deity.’ Our poet never dispenses with God. Instead 
of seeing no design in the universe, he finds nothing 
but design. “Strange,’’ says Frances Power Cobbe, 
“that when we once find out how a thing is done, we 
at once conclude that God has not done it!” Our 
intuitions are not valueless because we come from ape- 
like progenitors. <‘Intuitions are God’s tuitions,” and 
man, the end and goal of the development, explains the 
significance and purpose of all the lower forms that pre- 
pared the way for him. 

In the powers and faculties of man, the summit of 
creation, therefore, Browning finds the most conclusive 
evidence of God’s existence. We must interpret nature 
by man and not man by nature. Nature is no “ empty 
eye-socket,’ as Jean Paul expresses it, without life or 
intelligence, but shows everywhere a living face, to meet 
and respond to the face of man. We have heard in 
our day the mournful atheism of Fitzgerald’s “ Omar 
Khayyam ” : 

And that inverted bowl they call the sky, 
Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die, 


Lift not your hands to It for help—for It 
As impotently moves as you or I. 


Here the sweetness of the verse is like that of flowers 
upon a coffin. Contrast with this the glowing theism 
of Robert Browning : 

I know that He is there, as I am here, 

By the same proof, which seems no proof at all, 


It so exceeds familiar forms of proof. 
—Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 


The truth in God's breast 
Lies trace upon trace on ours impressed : 


422 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


Though he is so bright, and we so dim, 
We are made in his image to witness him. 
—Christmas Eve. 


God is behind all. 
We find great things are made of little things, 
And little things go lessening, till at last 
Comes God behind them. 
—Mr. Sludge, the Medium, 








God is the perfect poet, | 

Who, in creation, acts out his own conceptions. | 
— Paracelsus, | 

| 


And so, while nature is a manifestation of God, it is 
in man that God most perfectly reveals himself. Every, 
man has in him a divine element, and this presence of 

| 


MI 


God in man gives an infinite value and dignity to the 


t 


poorest and meanest human being. Browning, like 
John Milton before him, is a monist. He holds that 
there is but one substance or principle of being. All 
things are potentially spirit, or, in other words, the uni-| 
verse is a universe of spirits. Nature herself is in-| 
stinct with life, and all things show a divine idea and 
plan : | 
This is the glory, that, in all conceived 

Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind 

—Not mine, but like mine—for the double joy 

Making all things for me, and me for Him. 
—Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 





But he does not hesitate to include man, as well as 
nature, in this monistic view of the universe. Man too, 
in the deep basis of his being, is connected with God. 
Humanity is naturally rooted and grounded in him 
“from whom and through whom and to whom are all) 











A MONIST, BUT NOT A PANTHEIST 423 


Mhings.” In “The Ring and the Book,” the Pope 
-soliloquizes : 


O thou, —as represented to me here 

In such conception as my soul allows, — 

Under thy measureless, my atom-width ! 

Man’s mind, what is it but a convex-glass 
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points 
Picked out of the immensity of sky, 

To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, 

Our known Unknown, our God revealed to man? 


Professor Jones of Wales has given the best expo- 
sition of Robert Browning’s philosophy. He says that: 


While Browning insists on this identity of the human spirit with 
God, and declares all the phenomena of the world to be mani- 
festations of love, he does not forget that the identity is not abso- 
lute. Absolute identity would be pantheism, which leaves God 
lonely and loveless, and extinguishes man, as well as his morality. 
In his poem entitled ‘‘ Death in the Desert,’’ we read : 


‘«Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve; 
A Master to obey, a Cause to take, 
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become.’’ 


The unity of the divine and the human within the spiritual life 
of man is a real unity, just because man is free; the identity 
‘manifests itself through the difference ; and the difference is pos- 
; sible through the unity. . . He would find God in man, and yet 
leave man free. 


To this statement of Professor Jones I may add that 
Browning does not attempt to explain how unity of 
‘substance between God and man is consistent with 
freedom, sin, and guilt in the finite creature. Yet he 
believes in-these last, as firmly as in the first. Observe 


424 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


the two elements of his doctrine in the following lines, 
first, from “‘ Rabbi Ben Ezra”’: 


Rejoice we are allied 
To that which doth provide 
And not partake, effect and not receive ; 
A spark disturbs our clod : 
Nearer we hold of God 
Than of his tribes that take, I must believe. 





Here we are declared to be one with the Source and 
Giver of life. But now, secondly, note the limitation of 
this unity. In “Christmas Eve’’ we hear the poet 
deriding 
The important stumble 
Of adding, he, the sage and humble, 
Was also one with the Creator. 


He tells us that it was God’s plan to make man in his 
image : 
To create man, and then leave him 
Able, his own word saith, to grieve him ; 
But able to glorify him too, 
As a mere machine could never do 
That prayed or praised, all unaware 
Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, 
Made perfect as a thing of course. 


God, whose pleasure brought 

Man into being, stands away, 

As it were, a hand-breadth off, to give 
Room for the newly made to live, 
And look at him from a place apart, 
And use his gifts of brain and heart. 





Life’s business being just the terrible choice. : 
—The Ring and the Book, Pope, 1238. | 





THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE IS LOVE 425 


We may interpret all this by saying that the poet is a 


' monist, but an ethical monist, a believer that God and 


| 


_man are of one substance, but a hater of pantheism 


which denies God’s transcendence and separate person- 
ality. 

Sidney Lanier asserts that the last twenty centuries 
have spent their best power upon the development of 


personality, and that literature, education, government, 


and religion have all learned to recognize the individual 


as the unit of force. Of all poets, Robert Browning 
_most clearly perceives that the greatness and power of 


God are revealed in the very freedom of human person- 


ality and the consequent diversity of human life. Man 


has a freedom which he may abuse, and the essential 
thing in life is the opportunity for probation, choice, the 
determination and manifestation of character. The poet 


_ seizes a typical man at the crisis of his history, when all 


the influences of ancestry and environment converge 
to a focus upon him, and when he speaks the one word 
or makes the one decision which reveals to all eternity 
what manner of man he chooses to be. At that moment, 
that instant one and infinite, he takes his snap-shot, 
photographs the man, depicts his innermost thought 


-and character. But not because the single act or the 


single man is of supreme importance—rather, because 


in this particular man and this particular act we may see 


one aspect or manifestation of the infinite energy and 
the perfect character of God. 

It is easy to suggest difficulties here, and to maintain 
that our poet is formulating metaphysical and moral 


contradictions. Howcan ignorance and weakness mani- 


fest wisdom and power? Above all, how can falsehood 


426 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


and wickedness manifest the divine purity and truth ?} 
The complete answer to these questions Browning does 
not profess to give. He only suggests that there is an 
ultimate principle of unity, and tells us what it is, 
though without showing us in detail how the reconcilia- 
tion is effected. Here we come to another characteristic’ 
and fundamental feature of his system of thought. The 
principle that unifies all is Love. All grades of being 
are in some way embodiments of the supreme good, 
The whole is in every part. Unus homo, nullus homo, 
The universe in like manner is an organism, and every 
part ministers to the whole, as the whole to every part. 
So the world may be called the return of the highest to. 
itself, and the universe is homeward-bound. As all’ 
things are manifestations of spirit, so all things are’ 
manifestations of love. 













, 





Denn das Leben ist die Liebe, } 
Und des Lebens Lebengeist. 





Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception’ 
man can form. Mere intellect zs ot perfection ; here 
he differs from Hegel ; love zs perfection, for it includes 
intellect and all else. The poet was certainly a man of) 
affectionate nature; if he had not been, it is doubtful 
whether such a solution of the problems of life would. 
ever have dawned uren him. Fanny Kemble said he 
was the only man whom she had ever known that be- 
haved like a Christian to his wife. As she was frail and 
secluded from the world, he never but once during his: 
fifteen years of married life dined away from home. On 
every anniversary of his marriage, when he was in Lon- 
don, this robust Englishman, who did not ordinarily 








i. x, 
ie 
gery] 


BROWNING AN OPTIMIST 427 


deal in mere sentiment, went to the church where the 


| 


me ory had been performed, and kneeling down kissed 
the doorstep. In his last illness he called every night 


for the ring his wife had given him on her deathbed, and 


_pressed it to his lips before he went to sleep. He re- 


garded love as a direct emanation from the inmost 
nature of God, and the most essential article of his 


creed he summed up in the word in « Paracelsus” : 


God, thou art love! I build my faith on that! 


How could Browning believe the universe to be in 
every part a manifestation of love, when sin and wretch- 
edness abound? The answer is that he saw the love of 
God so demonstrated in Jesus Christ that these seem- 


‘ingly opposing phenomena ceased to trouble him. I do 


not mean that he held to any of the orthodox formulas 
as to the person of our Lord. His faith was doubtless 
a very liberal one. But he did see in Christ the most 
effective revelation of God. With his conviction that 


personality was the highest form of being was united a 


belief that only personal influences can ever transform 


‘Character. He declares that so powerful is a complete 


personality that its very touch gives life and courage and 
power. When he seeks stimulus for sustained effort, 
‘and inspiration for enduring virtue, he finds them in 
Jesus Christ. 

The proof of all this from Browning’s writings must 
be a cumulative one. Let me first quote from his let- 
ters. In writing to a lady in her last illness, he says: 
“Tt is a great‘thing—the greatest—that a human being 
should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its 
experience in a-witness to the power and love of God. 


428 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 











_ I see ever more reason to hold by the same hope.” 
And then he quotes the words of Charles Lamb, when 
“in a gay fancy with some friends as to how he and 
they would feel if the greatest of the dead were to ap: 
pear suddenly in flesh and blood once more, on the final 
suggestion: ‘And if Christ entered this room?” he 
changed his manner at once and stuttered out, as his 
manner was when moved: ‘You see, if Shakespeare 
entered, we should all rise; if He appeared, we shoulc 
all kneel!’” But why should Robert Browning joir 
with Charles Lamb in the worship of Christ? I answer 
first, because he regards Christ as God revealed, Deity 
active in nature and in history. The living God whor 
we see in nature is none other than Christ. Nature is 
not his body, in the sense that he is confined to nature 
Nature is his body, in the sense that zz nature we se¢ 
him who is adove nature, and in whom at the same time 
all things consist. 

Mrs. Orr, his biographer, says that Browning onet 
spoke to her with relation to his own religious opinions 
and concluded by reading to her the “Epilogue t 
Dramatis Personz.’’ She continues: 

It will be remembered that the beautiful and pathetic secon 
part of the poem is a cry of spiritual bereavement, the ch 
of those victims of nineteenth century skepticism for whon 
incarnate Love has disappeared from the universe, carrying with i 


the belief in God. The third part attests the continued existenc) 
of God in Christ, as mystically present to the individual soul : 


That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my Universe that feels and knows. 


‘‘That face,’’ said Mr. Browning as he closed a book, ‘tha 
face is the face of Christ : that is how I feel him.’ 








BROWNING AN OPTIMIST 429 


With one qualification the most orthodox believer 
may accept the view of the poet. Nature is an ex- 
pression of the mind and will of Christ, as my face is an 
expression of my mind and will. Rhetorically I can 


identify nature with Christ, just as I can identify my 


D 


‘ 


face with myself. But then let us remember that be- 
/hind and above my face is a personality of which the 


face is but the partial and temporary manifestation. 
And, in like manner, let us remember that nature is but 
the partial and temporary manifestation of the Christ 
who is not only zz all things, but defore all things, and 


above all things. 


There is a second reason why Browning bows to 


Christ, and that is because he who is the life of nature 
_and the moving power in history has taken human form 


\ 


-and has shown by an infinite self-sacrifice that God is 


love. I quote from several poems: 


From the first Power was, I knew ; 
Life has made clear to me 
That, strive but for closer view, 
Love were as plain to see. 
— Reverie, in Asolando. 


I never realized God's birth before, 
How he grew likest God in being born. 


Such ever was love’s way—to rise, it stoops. 
—Pompilia, in The Ring and the Book. 


Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! 
I think this the authentic sign and seal 
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad 
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts, 
Into a rage to suffer for mankind 
And recommence at sorrow. 
— Balaustion s Adventure. 


430 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


This man so cured regards the curer then 

As—God forgive me—who but God himself, 

Creator and Sustainer of the world, 

That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile. 

The very God !—think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 

So the All-Great were the All-loving too ! 

So through the thunder comes a human voice 

Saying : ‘‘O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 

Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 

Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of mine, 

But love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 

And thou must love me who have died for thee.’’ 
—Karshish, the Arabian Phystctan. 













| 

Would I suffer for him that I love? So wilt thou—so wilt thou |) 

So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown, 

And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up or down | | 

One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath, 

Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death ! 

As thy love is discovered Almighty, almighty be proved 

Thy power, that exists with it and for it, of being beloved ! 

He who did most, shall bear most ; the strongest shall stand the 
most weak. 

Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for; my flesh that I seek 

In the Godhead! I seek and I findit. O Saul, it shall be 

A Face like my face that receives thee : a man like to me ! 

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever! A hand like this hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ 
stand ! — Saul, 


io 


| 
: 
| 





After all these citations I think it will not be doubted 
that the secret of Browning’s persistent optimism lay in 
his recognition of Christ as God and Saviour. If the 
life that pulsates through all nature is the life of Christ, 
and if the hand that conducts the march of history is the 
hand that was nailed to the cross, then we may dismiss 
our fears and advance to the study of life’s problems 


| 


a 





THE LATER BROWNING A PHILOSOPHER 431 


with cheerful heart, believing with Pippa that, however 
great the intellectual difficulties may be, 





God’s in his heaven, 
All’s right with the world ! 


Or if any one still questions whether this is the real 
source of the poet’s quietude as he faces the mysteries 
and seeming contradictions of existence, I make one 
quotation from “ Death in the Desert”: 


SSS 


I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the world and out of it, 
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise ; 


and another from “The Ring and the Book,” where he 
speaks of 


The divine instance of self-sacrifice 

That never ends and aye begins for man. 
So, never miss I footing in the maze ; 
No! I have light, nor fear the dark at all. 


I wish that my account of Browning’s philosophical 
and religious views might only end here. In general it 
is the earlier Browning that I have been describing. 
The earlier Browning is Browning the poet; the later 
Browning is Browning the would-be philosopher. While 
he sticks to intuition and to poetry, he satisfies us. In 
his earlier poems he sees with the imagination and the 
heart, and his poems rouse us, warm us, inspire us, like 
Luther’s triumphant songs. He starts with insight 
and Scripture, and he is strong. He attempts to prove, 
and he becomes weak. He makes the mistake of 
attempting to put philosophy into poetry. He succeeds 


432 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


only in spoiling a good poet to make a poor philosopher. 
It is like the story of George Eliot over again—at first, 
simplicity and natural pathos, afterward over-elaboration 
and wearisome sententiousness. 

Was the change due to the weakening of imagina- 
tion and the strengthening of the merely logical intelli 
gence which growing years brought with them? Or did 
success in grappling with problems stimulate ambition’ 
to demonstrate the truth he saw? Certain it is that in- 
sight brings logic after it. The poet gives the hint to 
the philosopher. After A-schylus and Sophocles come 
Plato and Aristotle. And sometimes a long historical 
succession is represented in the life of a single individual. 
I am disposed, however, to connect the change in Brown- 
ing rather with a change of the utmost importance in his 
personal relations—I mean with Mrs. Browning's death, 
and with the loss of her insight and influence. The 
poet’s wife had more of native poetic ardor than her 
husband had. So long as she lived, he valued his 
proper vocation and was content with “the vision anc 
the faculty divine.” But when she left him, the mys: 
tery of life and death, of sin and sorrow, oppressed hin 
as never before. Her cultivation of his faith- instine’ 
was now lacking. He began to speculate. He deter 
mined to interpret the world in terms of spirit. He 
staked all on his ability to prove that all things are illus 
trations of love. 

But this was philosophy and not poetry. The effec 
upon his verse was not fortunate. In poetry it is no. 
the first step but the last step that costs. That las. 
step—of making the form perfect—he had always bee! 
averse to. His later work is full of rude vigor, but it 1) 








; 








MORAL EVIL SOMEHOW A FORM OF GOOD 433 


the vigor of a first draft—what he has written he has 
_written, and he more and more disdains to alter or 
| amend ; if the reader is scandalized by the roughness or 
“blindness of it, so much the worse for the reader. It is 
unfortunate that so many people get their first impres- 
sions of Browning from these later productions of his, 

i which involved and long-drawn reasoning is only 
occasionally relieved by a simile or aphorism that shows 
the sage and the seer. If this were the only Browning, 

we might well subscribe to the lines of George C. Brag- 
don, who describes him as: 


Versed in all schools, athirst for the unseen. 

He wrote in measures noble English prose, 
Dropping rich gems of poesy between, 

Where passion flamed through masterful repose, 


It was a mistake even so far as the philosophy was 
concerned, for poetry sees deeper than science does. 
‘Faith i is a sort of winged intellect, an operation of the 
‘integral mind, the highest activity of reason. Only love 
can give eyes to the mind. Only the intellect that is 
conditioned by a right state of the affections can ever 
Teach the highest truth. It is not blind faith but 
“Dlind unbelief” that is “sure to err and scan God’s 
works in vain.” Faith is not blind, but is endued with 
‘powers of insight which mere intellect can never boast 
of. When Browning ceased to trust his poetic insight 
and began to indulge in argument, he exchanged the 
Spear of Ithuriel for a weapon of merely earthly 
‘temper. 

| The poet’s thesis is that all things are manifestations 


of love. His earlier poems simply declare the fact, to- 
26 


434 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


gether with what he can see of God’s method, but with- 
out pretense of reconciliation ; as, for example, in “ Saul,” 
he says: 


I spoke as I saw— 
I report as man may of God’s work—all’s love, yet all’s law. 


But his later poems are efforts to defend his thesis in 
terms of intellect alone. Here he had to confront the 
fact of moral evil. Now there are two kinds of opti 
mism : first, Christian optimism, which asserts that, in 
spite of moral evil all things are working together for 
good; and secondly, pantheistic optimism, which asserts 
that all things ave good. With every inclination to put 
the best interpretation upon his work, I am obliged to, 
confess that Browning came dangerously near to the 
pantheistic explanation of sin. And Dr. E. G. Robin- 
son has well said that “ Sin explained is sin defended.” | 

Let us trace from step to step the growth of this 
wrong principle. Robert Browning wished to see in all 
things, even the worst, only -various forms of good.) 
He describes the result of his observations as follows : 








All the same, 
Of absolute and irretrievable black—black’s soul of black, ~ 
Beyond white’s power to disintensify— 
Of that I saw no sample; such may wreck 
My life and ruin my philosophy 


To-morrow, doubtless. 
—Ferishtah’s Fancies. 


He depicted the criminals in “The Ring and the Book,’ 
only to show | 


In the absolutest drench of dark 
Some stray beauty-beam, to the despair of hell. 





MORAL EVIL SOMEHOW A FORM OF GOOD 435 


. So even Guido, that arch-fiend among mortals, who 
declared that, as he had tried to murder Pompilia here, 
‘so he would murder her in the next world if he could 
only catch her there, is made to give at least one sign 
of incipient morality in his last cry for mercy : 


‘‘Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”’ 


* Our poet set out with a firm belief in personality and 
freedom. If he had kept this constantly in mind, he 
would have referred all evil to the perversity of the 
finite will. But he thought it necessary, instead, to 
refer it somehow to God. This could only result in a 
gradual blurring of the clear line between moral good 
and moral evil. How shall moral evil be shown to have 
in it an element of good? In this way: Man’s life is a 
progress through strife. The important thing is to 
rouse the will. Evil awakens man’s active energies, 
incites him to conflict and endeavor. So evil is the 
necessary means of good. But it is clear that, in this 
explanation, the moral idea already begins to be lost 
sight of, and force takes the place of right. Virtue is 
defined as mere valor in the battle of life. Better 
seek evil with one’s whole mind, than be lukewarm in 
goodness. Indifference and spiritual lassitude are the 
worst of sins. ‘The Statue and the Bust” seems to 
teach that vigorous transgression is better than pusil- 
lanimous rectitude. Says Browning : 











I hear your reproach: ‘ But delay was best ; 

For their end was a crime.’’ Oh, a crime will do 
As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 

As virtue golden through and through, 
Sufficient to vindicate itself 

And prove its worth at a moment's view. 


436 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


Here let us listen to Professor Boyesen’s interpreta- 
tion: 









What Browning contends is that passion is the expression of the 
personality at its floodtide ; it is the man’s or the woman’s power 
at its climax; it is the rich blossoming of the soul; and the fail- 
ure to obey its prompting is a sacrilege, a wasting of golden mo- 
ments that will never return. It is in these moments that life 
reaches out for its fulfillment ; and dying, without having tasted 
their sweetness, is death indeed ; is sterility and failure. It is as 
if the plant should die without having blossomed. The mora], 
objections to this doctrine are known to Browning in all thei 
aspects, but he chooses never to emphasize them. It is doubtful) 
whether he would recommend his philosophy to any one as é 
guide of action. . . Quite apart from the fact that society must, 
for its own protection, punish nonconformity in morals, the 
pursuer of pleasure for its own sake, or for his own sake, wil 
always have the experience of Ixion—he will embrace a cloud. 
Even from a purely philosophical point of view the words of Chris. 
are true: ‘‘He that seeketh his life shall lose it; and he tha. 
loseth his life, for my sake, shall find it.”’ | 


With this criticism of Boyesen I heartily agree) 
Browning in attributing the origin of evil to God hai 
come dangerously near to consecrating every abnorma_ 
impulse of human nature. Right is simply might. hh 
«The Ring and the Book,” the pope is a warrior-priest 
and Pompilia reaches the height of virtue by becoming 
energetic. Browning would have agreed with Dante i 
consigning to a specially despicable Limbo those whi 
were not good enough for heaven and who had not chat 
acter enough for hell. Luther’s “ Pecca fortiter”’ seem) 
to be the recipe for true greatness. | 

Is all moral failure, then, only apparent? Is sin onl: 
a phantom? Are right and wrong only illusions to stin; 
men to effort? Is Ottima just as good in her place a 








| 


RIGHT AND WRONG ARE ILLUSIONS 437 


Pippa? It certainly seems as if this were at times 
Browning’s doctrine. He says: 


All service ranks the same with God— 
With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
Are we ; there is no last or first. 
—LPippa Passes. 


In spite of the evil will that opposes the good, the poet 


seems to take the voice of conscience in man as evidence 
of his moral worthiness, instead of its being evidence 
that he knows the right and so is the more guilty for 
the wrong. 

Sin then is not the willful grieving of God and depar- 


ture from his commandment which Browning’s earlier 
poems had declared it to be. It is rather a necessary 
result of the limitations of man’s finite being. It is the 
blundering of inexperience, the thoughtlessness that 
takes evil for good, the ignorance that puts its fingers 
into the fire, the stumbling without which one cannot 
learn to walk. It is a fruit which is sour and bitter 


simply because it is immature. It is a means of dis- 


Cipline and training for something better—it is holiness 


in the germ, good in the making; and, so long as we are 


finite creatures, the idea of escaping from it is, as Goethe 


) expresses it, like “the idleness of wishing to Beh off 


from one’s own shadow.’ 


5) 


Our moral nature, however, revolts against this view. 
James Russell Lowell said truly: 


In vain we call old notions fudge 
And bend our conscience to our dealing ; 
The ten commandments will not budge 
And stealing will continue stealing. 


438 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


What shall be done with this voice of conscience? Is 
the solemn utterance of our moral nature only a decep- 
tion? The answer is substantially this, that, as evil is 
necessary to good, so error is necessary to truth. We 
cannot know truth except as the antithesis to error; we 
cannot gain truth except by putting off error; in other 
words, error is only partial truth, that prepares the way 
for truth that is more complete. 


Man must pass from old to new, 

From vain to real, from mistake to fact, 

From what once seemed good, to what now proves best. 
—Death in the Desert. 


What were life, 
Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife 
Through the ambiguous Present to the goal 
Of some all-reconciling Future? 
—Gerard de Latresse. 


The space 
Which yields thee knowledge—do its bounds embrace 
Well-willing and wise-working, each at height? 
Enough : beyond this lies the infinite— 


Back to thy circumscription ! 
—Francis Turint. 


Take the joys and bear the sorrows—neither with extreme 
concern ! 
Living here means nescience simply : ’t is next life that helps 
to learn. 





—La Satsiaz. | 


But this is skepticism and agnosticism. If nothing is 
true, or if nothing is known, then this theory is not 
true or its truth cannot be known. Browning was a) 
poet rather than a metaphysician, or he could hardil 
have accepted a scheme so self-contradictory. | 





k , 
if 


} 
j 
| 


| 


{ 
| 


BUT LOVE IS OF GOD 439 


But let us get the scheme itself more fully before us. 


_ The doctrine is, that ignorance and deception are need- 
ful if man is to strive and grow. To know things as 
they really are would reveal all as locked together in a 
system of universal good; but to know this would be 


the greatest of disasters, since stimulus to activity 
would then be lacking. Evil is only illusion, but the 
knowledge of that fact would paralyze all moral effort. 


To believe that evil is only evil, however, would be 


alike ruinous, since it would take away all trust in uni- 
versal providence and all ground of hope for the future. 
Hence we are left to faith. In default of intellectual 
certainty we betake ourselves to our fundamental pos- 
tulate that love is the controlling principle of all, and 
we conclude that ignorance is only love’s instrument. 


Good can be known only by the contrast of evil; evil 


is but illusion, the necessary stepping-stone to good; 
Love permits the illusion, only to incite to good. 
_ But is not God truth and right, as well as love? 


Here we come to another peculiarity of Browning’s 


thinking. In his earlier poems he did apply to truth 


and right the same principle that he applied to love. 
In “Christmas Eve” he says: 


For Justice, Good, and Truth were still 
Divine, if, by some demon’s will, 

Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed 

Law through the worlds, and Right misnamed. 


And in “A Soul’s Tragedy ” he adds: 


Were ’t not for God, I mean, what hope of truth— 
Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with man? 
I trust in God, the Right shall be the Right, 

And other than the Wrong, while he endures, 


440 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


Here truth and right are declared as divine and eter- 
nal as God himself. But in his later productions he 
classes these by themselves, and sets love above them 
as the only thing divine and eternal. Man’s love is a 
gift from God and a means of interpreting God—not 
so man’s knowledge. While “love gains God at first 
leap,” knowledge is always defective. A radical flaw 
runs through our knowing faculty. In his last poems 
he seems to grant that intellect finds mere power ruling 
on every side, indifferent to morally good or evil, while 
heart rebels against this conclusion of intellect, and be- 
lieves that even power will some day be seen to be love : 








When see? When there dawns a day, 

If not on this homely earth, 
Then yonder, worlds away, 

Where the strange and the new have birth, 
And Power comes full in play. 


This setting of the heart against the intellect, and the! 
affections against the reason, is not only to make man’s 
nature inherently self-contradictory, but to make God, 
who reveals himself in man’s reason, essentially unvera: 
cious. Conscience cannot acquiesce in this explanation, 
of evil as only apparent. And love protests against the 
sorrow that evil brings in its train. We feel that the 
divinest thing in us is our recognition of the essentia, 
and eternal difference between right and wrong, and we 
feel also that God cannot be the author of moral evil) 
even though it should prove in the end to be merely 
apparent and transient. Browning himself feels the 
pressure of this difficulty. He asks: 











Wherefore should any evil hap to man, 
From ache of flesh to agony of soul, 








KNOWLEDGE IS ONLY APPARENT 44I 


Since God’s All-mercy mates All-potency ? 
Nay, why permits he evil to himself— 

Man’s sin, accounted such? Suppose a world 
Purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant— 

Man pure of evil in thought, word, deed— 
Were it not well? Then wherefore otherwise? 


The only answer is that the apparent existence of evil 
is the necessary condition of goodness. If man is to 
aspire and attain, the present must seem to him in- 
| adequate, imperfect, wrong. But the evil must still be 
only apparent, since God is love. We are to believe 
and love, in spite of all that intellect may say. 


Man’s part 
Is plain, to send love forth, astray perhaps ; 


No matter—he has done his part. 
—The Sun. 


We can now perceive how deep a speculative error 
that was into which Browning fell when, in order to sub- 
‘stantiate his optimistic faith, he stigmatized human 
knowledge as only apparent. His appeal from the 
head to the heart should have been an appeal from the 
‘narrower knowledge of the mere intellect to the larger 
knowledge which is conditioned upon right affection. 
Human nature cannot be cut in two with a hatchet. 
| We must not sever the intellect from the affections. 
Yet that is what our poet did. Instead of standing by 
his earlier utterances with regard to finite personality 
and freedom, and referring all sin and misery to the ab- 
normal working of the human will, he must somehow 

find in God the ground and explanation of moral evil. 
This requires him by hook or by crook to turn evil into 
good. But if moral black is at bottom only moral 


A42 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 











white, there is evident mistake in our most serious 
moral judgments. Hence, knowledge must be dis 
credited, and truth itself be made a merely subjective 
and relative thing. And this implies that, though love 
comes from God, truth does not; in other words, Goc 
is love, but he is not truth. 

A sad falling off from the earlier Browning! Hov 
sad can be estimated by one or two quotations from hii 
earlier works. ‘The Ring and the Book” marks thi 
high tide of his poetic insight, before his faith had 
taken an agnostic philosophy for its treacherous ai 
There he says: 


Truth nowhere lies, yet everywhere, in these ; 
Not absolutely in a portion, yet evolvable 
From the whole, evolved at last 

Painfully, held tenaciously, by me. 


Yet my poor spark had for its source the Sun ; 
Thither I sent the great looks that compel 
Light from its fount: all that I do and am 
Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised, 
Remembered or divined, as mere man may. 


and in “Christmas Eve” we read: 


What is left for us, save, in growth 
Of soul, to rise up, far past both, 
From the gift looking to the giver, i) 
And from the cistern to the river, 
And from the finite to infinity, 

And from man’s dust to God’s divinity ? 


So in “ Paracelsus,” ‘Easter Day,” ~—“ Rabbilgam 
Ezra,” “Death in the Desert,’ knowledge as well as 
love is treated as an emanation from God. With thes¢ 


A FALLING OFF FROM THE EARLIER BROWNING 443 





_ poems, his later works, «La Saisiaz,” “Ferishtah’s Fan- 
cies,” “ The Parleyings,” and « Asolando,” form a pain- 
ful contrast. In these an intellectual pessimism hangs 
like an old man of the sea upon the neck of his moral 
optimism and greatly hampers its free going. When 
| the poet concedes that knowledge is only dissembling 
ignorance, and that faith is only blind trust, he plucks 





out his own right eye. 
So Browning condemns man to strive for a truth he 
€an never attain, as Carlyle, with a similar philosophy, 
condemns him to strive for a goodness he can never 
achieve. Browning saw more deeply than Carlyle, when 
he maintained that divine love was at the heart of all 
things. Professor Jones has finely indicated the con- 
trast between these two literary lights of our day, when 
he says that Carlyle saw in law only the work of a great 
taskmaster, and in man only hopeless confusion. He is 
so busy working himself, that he sees no other workers. 
‘But Browning is certain of the moral purpose of life, of 
the grand result of good toward which the universe is 
moving, because law to him is only the method of love. 
Carlyle saw God as lawgiver and judge, but not as 
helper; as a God within, only in conscience, issuing 
imperatives and threats, not within as a beneficent and 
regenerating power. But to Browning, all moral prog- 
Tess is the spiritual incarnation of God, God’s love put- 
| ting itself into human action, and bringing good out of 
‘evil. How great the pity that Browning could not have 
‘carried his doctrine farther, and have seen that, as all 
‘human love, even the poorest, is God’s love in man flow- 
‘ing back to its source, so all human knowledge is God’s 
‘truth in man bearing witness to him from whom it 








444 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 





comes! Knowledge is not ‘lacquered ignorance’ 
simply because it is not complete. We can know truly 
without knowing exhaustively. God is light as well as 
love, and the ideal without is not only a power of love 
but also a power of knowledge, within. | 

Yet, in spite of his speculative errors, this poet of the 
soul found love a guarantee for immortality. We may 
separate the soul from the body, its instrument, but this 
separation does not arrest the course of its moral devel 
opment. Here is an optimism that refuses to confine 
its view to the narrow span of three score years and ten, 


Have you found your life distasteful ? 
My life did, and does, smack sweet. 
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful ? 
Mine I saved, and hold complete. 
Do your joys with age diminish ? 
When mine fail me, I'll complain. 
Must in death your daylight vanish ? 
My sun sets to rise again. 
—At the Mermaid. 


Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain | 
And this first life claims a second, else I count its good no gain. 


What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes— 


Man has forever. . 
—The Grammartan’s Funeral, 


No work begun shall ever pause for death. 


There shall never be one lost good ; what was, shall live as before 

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 

What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much more ; 

On the earth, the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round. | 
—Abt Vogler, 


LOVE A GUARANTEE FOR IMMORTALITY 445 
And so Robert Browning was to the end 


| 
/ One who never turned his back, but’marched breast forward ; 
| Never doubted clouds would break ; 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph ; 
| Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
| Sleep to wake. 


The death of Mrs. Browning deprived him of his best 
adviser and left him to struggle, not always successfully, 
‘with oppositions of science falsely so called. Yet that 
‘death directed all his later thinking to the future life, 

gave him a fresh and ineradicable conviction of immor- 
tality, and made his words a source of courage and faith 
to this generation not only, but to many generations to 
come. How much our age needed his message will 
appear, if I quote from the “ Rubaiyat”’ of Omar Khay- 
yam, whose melodious pessimism has seemed to so many 
like an Epicurean gospel : 


I came like water, and like wind I go. 


Up from earth’s center through the seventh gate 
I rose and on the throne of Satan sate, 

And many a knot unraveled by the Road, 

But not the master-knot of human fate. 


There was the door to which I found no key ; 
There was the veil through which I might not see ; 
Some little talk awhile of 7 and Thee 

There was, and then no more of Zee and Me. 


Earth could not answer, nor the seas that mourn 
In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn ; 

Nor rolling Heaven, with all his signs revealed, 
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn, 


446 THE THEOLOGY OF BROWNING 


Then of the Zee in Me, who works behind 

The veil, I lifted up my hands to find 

A Lamp amid the darkness ; and I heard 

As from without : ‘‘The Je within 7%ee find !"’ 


Then to the lips of this poor earthen Urn 

I leaned, the secret of my life to learn ; 

And lip to lip it murmured: ‘‘ While you live, 
Drink! for once dead, you never shall return !’’ 


Robert Browning has hope for the bad as well as for 
the good—not hope for them in their badness, but hope 
that the badness may yet be purged out of*them. Even 
of Guido, the typical villain, as he enters eternity, the 
Pope says: 


Else I avert my face, nor follow him 
Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state 
Where God unmakes, but to remake, the soul 
He else made first in vain : which must not be! 
— The Ring and the Book. 


And in his poem entitled “ Apparent Failure,” we read: 


It’s wiser being good than bad, 

It’s safer being meek than fierce, 

It’s fitter being sane than mad. 
My own hope is, a sun will pierce 

The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
That, after Last, returns the First, 

Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 
That what began best, can’t end worst, 

Nor what God blest once, prove accurst. 


And as for Browning’s personal prospect, I think it 
cannot be doubted that he spoke out of his own heart 
in §Prospiceé?’ss 








LOVE A GUARANTEE FOR IMMORTALITY 


Fear death ?—to feel the fog in my throat, 
The mist in my face, 

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
I am nearing the place, 

The power of the night, the stress of the storm, 
The post of the foe, 

Where he stands, the Arch-Fear, in a visible form ? 
“Yet the strong man must go: 

For the journey is done, and the summit attained, 
And the barriers fall, 

Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 
The reward of it all. 

I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more 
The best and the last ! 

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore, 
And let me creep past. 

No! let me take the whole of it, fare like my peers, 
The heroes of old ; 

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears, 
Of pain, darkness, and cold. 

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 
The black minute’s at end, 

And the elements rage, the fiend-voices that rave 
Shall dwindle, shall blend, 

Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy, 
Then a light, then thy breast, 

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest ! 


447 





Z 
O 
N) 
> 
a 
A 
fa 
tH 








TENNYSON 


POETRY AS INTERPRETING THE DIVINE ORDER 


FEw poets have given so early promise of greatness 

as did Alfred Tennyson. At five years of age in his 
father’s garden, when caught and swept along by a gale, 
he exclaimed: “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the 
wind!” His first verses were inscribed upon a slate at 
home, while his elders were at church. “ Yes, you can 
write!” said his brother Charles, after he had read them. 
The grandfather was not so hopeful. He gave Alfred 
a half-sovereign for a few lines upon his grandmother’s 
death, with the words: “That is the first money you 
have earned by your poetry and, my word for it, it will 
be your last.” He little thought that the manuscript 
of the “Poems by Two Brothers,” including Alfred’s 
first productions, would be one day sold for two thou- 
sand one hundred and fifty dollars, and that a single 
copy of the published work would bring one hundred 
ind twenty dollars. 
_ At Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where the poet was 
orn and where he gained the most of his preparatory 
Taining for the university, he spent his youth in the 
still air of delightful studies. The father was variously 
earned, with gifts for painting, architecture, and music, 
ts well as for poetry and the classic languages. A 
weet and gentle mother bound the household together 
| 4sI 





452 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER ‘ei 





by ties of reverence and love, so that faith in woman. 
kind beat henceforth with the poet’s blood. There 
were twelve children in the rectory family, and of the 
seven sons the two older than himself were poets also, 
The village numbered scarcely a hundred souls. It was 
far removed from the noise of politics or trade. But 
there were books in plenty, and there was endless story-) 
telling at the table and around the hearth. The news 
of the battle of Waterloo never penetrated to that re, 
mote corner of the earth; but there were mimic battles 
fought on the lawn, with rods stuck in the ground for 
kings, with knights on either side to defend them, and 
with an inexhaustible artillery of stones for their over: 
throw. | 
The * Ode to Meron ” is still printed among the 

juvenile works of the author, but it has touches that are 
worthy of his prime. It tells of the strong impression: 
that were made upon him by his English home, thay 
haunt of ancient peace : 

Come from the woods that belt the gray hillside, 

The seven elms, the poplars four, 

That stand beside my father’s door, 

And chiefly from the brook that loves | 

To purl o’er matted cress and ribbed sand, | 

Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, 

Drawing into his narrow earthen urn, 


| 
In every elbow and turn, 
The filtered tribute of the rough woodland. 


— > 











O! hither lead thy feet ! 
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat 
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 
Upon the ridged wolds, 
When the first matin-song hath wakened loud 
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn, 





HIS CONCEPTION OF POETRY 453 


What time the amber morn 

Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud. 
_ Here are a keen observation of nature, a sparkling 
freshness of phrase, and a pure affection for the scenes 
| of childhood. None of these, however, are sure proofs 
of coming greatness. There are other lines of greater 
‘significance in this same “ Ode to Memory” : 


In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest 
| Thou leddest by the hand thy infant Hope. 
The eddying of her garments caught from thee 
The light of thy great presence ; and the cope 
Of the half-attained futurity, 
Though deep, not fathomless, 
Was cloven with the million stars that tremble 
O’er the deep mind of dauntless infancy. 
| Small thought was there of life’s distress ; 
For sure she deemed no mist of earth could dull 
Those spirit-thrilling eyes so keen and beautiful. 
Sure she was nigher to heaven's spheres, 
Listening the lordly music flowing from 
The illimitable years. 


These last words are repeated and preserved from 
“Timbuctoo,” the first poem of the author published 
under his own name. They are in the grand style, and 
they disclose the central thought of the poet’s life and 
work. He has in mind something larger than the fabled 
music of the spheres, namely, the ordered march of the 
ages and of all their histories. He found within him 
an impulse to measured speech. But this would have 
been child’s play if he had not felt it to correspond 
with rhythmical realities in the universe. There is an 
order which pervades all time as well as all space. It 


454 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


is the function of the poet to discover that order, and te 
interpret it to men.) Tennyson began his work with a 
right theory of art. His position in literature and his 
influence upon his generation cannot be understood with- 
out recognizing this. | 

What is merely intimated in the “ Ode to Memory” 
is clearly expressed elsewhere. Not often has a great 
singer in his first lays so fully spread out the programme 
of his career as has our author in another early poem, 
“The Poet.” Rarely has the after-harvest given so 
abundant witness to the quality of the seed. And 
never, I believe, has any literary sower committed this, 
seed more daringly or more tremblingly to the earth: | 





1 





The poet in a golden clime was born, 
With golden stars above ; i 
Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love. | 
He saw through life and death, through good and ill | 
He saw through his own soul. 
The marvel of the everlasting Will, 
An open scroll, } 


se 


Before him lay : with echoing feet he threaded 
The secretest walks of fame: y 
The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed 
And winged with flame. | 


So, many minds did gird their orbs with beams, 
Though one did fling the fire ; | 

Heaven flow’'d upon the soul in many dreams 
Of high desire. 


Thus truth was multiplied on truth, the world 
Like one great garden show’ d, { 





ee 


THE TRUE POET IS A PROPHET ALSO ASS 


And, through the wreaths of floating dark upcurl’d, 
Rare sunrise flow’ d. 


Her words did gather thunder as they ran, 
And as the lightning to the thunder 

Which follows it, riving the spirit of man, 
Making earth wonder, 


So was their meaning to her words. No sword 
Of wrath her right arm whirl’ d, 


But one poor poet's scroll, and with 42s word 
She shook the world. 


So much of sound philosophy is condensed into these 
lines, and so much of Tennyson’s own theory of art, 
that I venture, even at the risk of repeating what J 
have said in other essays, to point out some of the fea- 
tures of his poetic creed. All truth is material for the 
poet, whether it be truth of nature or of the human 
soul, of history or of the divine purpose that unifies his- 
tory. One ordered realm of truth is open to the poet’s 
gaze, and he is truth’s interpreter. He deals with truth, 
however, not in its abstract forms, but in its power to 
move and sway the soul—with truth therefore in its 
aspect as beauty, and as fit to charm and stir, to in- 
spirit and energize. Not mere fact, but tendency, not 
the individual, but the type, not the sequences of life, 
but the order and beauty which lie behind them, it is 
the poet’s mission to discover and to declare—and al) 
for the good of human kind and for the unveiling of the 
divine love and wisdom. 

__ The true poet then hasamoral aim. He isa prophet 
vf the Highest. He does not minister to pleasure, 
ight and fugitive, but to man’s lasting good. He does 


456 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


not depict the actual, so much as the ideal. He is not 
a photographer of all that is, so much as he is a delinea- 
tor of that which ought to be. His art does not exist 
for art’s sake, but for humanity’s sake and for God's 
sake. He peers into the great purpose of good at the! 
heart of the universe, in order that he may promote 
that purpose. And as it is his greater powers of love 
that enable him to see the universal order, so love en- 
ables him to pity the disorder which man has wrought, 
and to lend his own inspiring words to set that disorder! 
right. In short, the poet is the man of deeper feeling, 
and therefore of larger insight, who sees the inner truth 
and order of the world, through all its superficial falsity 
and disorder, with a view to expressing that truth and 
order in forms of beauty and for purposes of goodness, 

In his later poems Tennyson has more fully set forth 
his conception of his mission. Without faith in an 
eternal order, he calls the world, 








This round of green, this orb of flame, 
Fantastic beauty ; such as lurks q 
In some wild Poet, when he works 
Without a conscience or an aim. 


i 
= 
Knowledge severed from love and faith, he says, | 
“a child, and vain.” Goethe had declared that “the 
great poet must be free from all moral prepossessions.” 
Tennyson, on the contrary, regards wisdom, or knowl- 
edge tempered by love, as essential to poetic inspira- 
tion. The faith which constitutes the heart and z 





of his writings is expressed in the closing lines of 
“In Memoriam.” There he confesses a personal and. 
loving God, who is the source of the world’s “7 





THE TRUE POET IS A PROPHET ALSO 457 





and the guarantee that it will wisely reach its appointed 


Wend : 
; That God, which ever lives and loves, 
2. One God, one law, one element, 

j And one far-off divine event, 


To which the whole creation moves, 





{ do not mean that this view of the universe, or of 

his relation to it as interpreter; was so definite and con- 

scious at the beginning of his career as it was at the 
Close. His faith was no “idle ore,” 


But iron dug from central gloom, 
And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 
And batter’ d with the shocks of doom, 


To shape and use. 


My purpose, indeed, is to trace the development of this 
faith. It will be found, if I mistake not, that its history 
and the history of the poet are one and the same thing. 
For the very reason that Tennyson’s belief in a divine 
order is more than a native tendency of mind, is rather 
an achievement, made by struggle with many opposing 
influences until at last it became a settled consciousness 
of the soul, for this reason he constitutes not only the 
best representative of his age, but also its most power- 
ful poetic influence. 


He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the spectres of the mind 

And laid them : thus he came at length 


| To find a stronger faith his own ; 
And Power was with him in the night, 


458 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Which makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone, 


But in the darkness and the cloud. 













} 


Although Waterloo was unheard of, the news of Lord 
Byron’s death reached the rectory of Somersby. It 
stirred the hearts of those imaginative children as ne 
political event ever could. To young Alfred, it seemed 
as if the world were over and done for. Now that this 
great literary light was extinguished, there was nothing 
left of any worth. He walked out alone and carved 
deep into the sandstone, and with the feeling that the 
inscription marked the tombstone of the universe, the 
words, “Byron is dead!” It is an illustration of the 
fascination which that wayward and passionate spirit 
exerted upon all English-speaking youth. Byron was 
the artistic counterpart of the French Revolution, with 
its fierce license, its revolt against established forms, its) 
wild determination to be free. The influence of Byron 
is quite perceptible in Tennyson’s juvenile verse. There} 
are imitations of “The Maid of Athens,” and of “ The} 
Destruction of Sennacherib.” 

But Byron and his school burnt over the ground, so, 
that poetry of this sort could not grow again. They | 
passion to death. The world tired of the Satanic in 
literature. There came a natural reaction, and Words. 
worth was its representative. It was a return to nature, 
idyllic, calm, sincere. It appealed to the thoughtful. 
But dramatic fervor was lacking. Tennyson’s “ Dora” 
and “The Miller’s Daughter” are in Wordsworth’s 
manner. Our poet had in him too much of life and 
fire, to follow long in the ways of Wordsworth’s tame sim- 











FIRST PERIOD OF DAINTY GRACE 459 


‘plicity. Poetry has been described as “great thoughts 
clothed in splendor.” Tennyson has retained much 
of Byron’s dramatic energy, though he lacks something 
of his rush and spontaneity. He combines with this 
dramatic energy much of the idyllic sweetness of Words- 
worth, while he is master of a condensation and of a 
‘selective skill which neither Byron nor Wordsworth ever 
‘possessed. Of prosaic passages he is almost wholly 
guiltless. He is at the same time the greatest example 
of pure beauty in English poetical literature. 

Let us, with William Watson, distinguish between 
beauty and style. In women, style does not imply pure 
beauty. Milton is unapproached in pure poetic endow- 
Ment, and presents to us the highest summit of style. 
But he is no doubt less perfectly beautiful than Tenny- 
son. There is a perpetual refinement and elegance in 
our later poet which the earlier seldom equals. We can 
almost believe the current story that Tennyson has made 
it his rule to keep his productions seven years under the 
file before printing them. In this respect he resembles 
Virgil; indeed, he is our English Virgil, not merely for 
the minute care and the uniform merit of his verse, but 
for his embodiment in it of the principle of artistic, civil, 
social, and religious order. Tennyson is the poet of 
organized society, as truly as was Virgil the poet of the 
Roman Empire. 

He has been said to belong to “the art-school of 
poets.”’ There is much truth in the phrase. His artistic 
impulses antedated the substance of his message. The 
instrument was shaped before the music was written. 
It seems a providential preparation for subsequent work. 
Tennyson’s first productive period was distinguished by 








460 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


mastery of form rather than of thought. There was a 
dainty grace, somewhat out of proportion to the mean, 
ing. Sense was subordinated to sound. We must regard 
« Airy, fairy Lilian,” and “Where Claribel Low Lieth,” 
rather as metrical experiments, than as significant ven- 
tures into the realm of true poetry. Tennyson served 
an apprenticeship like that of Robert Louis Stevenson, 
He first familiarized himself with the machinery of 
style—only afterward did he learn to use it. 

In “ Poems, Chiefly Lyrical,” his earliest publication, 
the most promising were “The Poet” and “ The Ode tc 
Memory,” already mentioned. “Mariana,” “ The Sea 
fairies,’ and “ Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” alll 
had a charm of melody and a pictorial beauty. But they, 
were over-fanciful. There is a sense of effort in the 
frequency of the compound words, in the revival of 
terms antiquated or obsolete, and in the irregularity ol 
the metre. The new music of the verse did not bling 
the critics to its defects. ‘Blackwood’s Magazine” found, 
the author “self-willed and perverse in his infantile 
vanity,” and “hampered by a puerile partiality for par 
ticular forms of expression.”” Christopher Nerth callec 
his book “dismal drivel,” and, alluding to the little poe 
“The Owl,” said that Mr. Tennyson himself was “the 
greatest owl.” The “ Hang-draw-and Quarterly ” that 
criticised Tennyson, however, had previously cut uf 
quite as savagely the “ Endymion” of John Keats. 

It may be interesting to pursue still further this his 
tory of criticism. It will show through what a fiery 
gauntlet every new claimant to poetic honors must pass: 
The first book, printed in 1830, was followed by anothei 
in 1833, with the title: “The Lady of Shalott, and othe! 














FIRST PERIOD OF DAINTY GRACE 461 


” 


Poems.’ Among these other poems was “Oenone.”’ It 
-provoked the anger of Carlyle, as a mere echo of the 
classics instead of original work dealing with the life of 
‘the present, and he said of Tennyson: ‘“ There he sits, 
‘upon a dungheap, surrounded with innumerable dead 
dogs.” Yet Carlyle came to regard Tennyson with 
pride and admiration. When he read “The Revenge,”’ 
mee cried, “Eh, he’s got the grip o’ it!” He asked 
Richard Monckton Milnes why he had not secured a 
pension for Alfred Tennyson. Milnes replied that his 
constituents knew nothing of poetry and would think 
the pension a matter of personal favoritism. Carlyle 
responded: “Richard Milnes! in the day of judgment, 
when you are asked why you did not get that pension, 
-you may lay the blame on your constituents, but it is 
you that will be damned!” 

_ The pension of two hundred pounds was granted in 
1845, and in 1850 Tennyson was made poet-laureate. 
It is said that Sir Robert Peel, when the poet was men- 
tioned in connection with the laureateship, had never 
tead a line of his‘writings. He took up “Ulysses,” 
-however,. and that one poem convinced him. Even 
after the honor had been conferred, the poet had to fight 
for his reputation. Bulwer called him “School-Miss 
| Alfred ” ; spoke of him as “ out-babying Wordsworth ” ; 
-and in “The New Timon, a Romance of London,” 
described him as “ quartered on the public purse, in the 
prime of life, without either wife or family.” Last of 
all, and least of all, Alfred Austin, so late as 1869, con- 
‘tributed an article to “Temple Bar”’ on “ The Poetry of 
the Period,” in which he declared that “ Mr. Tennyson 
has no sound pretensions to be called a great poet.” 


462 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Tennyson always chafed under criticism. He replied 
to Christopher North: 


When I learnt from whom it came 

I forgave you all the blame, 
Musty Christopher ; 

I could zo¢ forgive the praise, 
Fusty Christopher. 








He retorted upon Bulwer by calling him a “band: 
box,’ and by pointing out that the true Timon did not 
wear his hair in curl-papers. I do not know that he 
ever thought it worth his while to notice the disparage. 
ment of Alfred Austin. It must be confessed that 
there was a vein of self-consciousness in our poet, and a 
sort of stately vanity, which a little detracted from te 
highest greatness. 

Recent stories illustrate these characteristics. When 
entertaining or entertained, he expected to read from his 
own poems. ‘Come and let me read you ‘ Maud,’”’ said 
he to Mr. Fields, “ you will never forget it!” At an 
English country house where he appeared unexpect Gaal 
though he was asked to read, not a single copy of his 
works could be found—all had been taken to another 
place. The host was embarrassed; but the occasion, 
was made laughably memorable nen Mr. Tennyson, 
in a petulant and contemptuous voice, said: “ Bring me 
Shakespeare!’ When traveling on the Rhine, he read 
a poem of his own in the half-intelligible Dodonic chant 
so natural to him, and when he closed the book he broke’ 
the spell with the question : “Could Browning do that ?” 
Nothing seemed to inspire him more than to hold the 

| 





hand of some lady while he read, and he once, in an 





————— 


HIS PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 463 


imperial party, unconsciously grasped the hand of the 
Empress Augusta and held it through the entire read- 
ing, only to discover his mistake and to make most pro- 
fuse apologies at the end, apologies which were as gra- 
ciously received as they were humbly offered. 

_ The poet has been described as “a great-boned, loose- 
limbed, gigantesque man, with domed head, soft dark 
hair, gentle eyes; white, smooth, fine-lined brow covered 
with delicate skin through which the blue veins shone.” 
Force and fineness were united in him, Bayard Taylor 
speaks of him as “tall and broad-shouldered as a son of 
Anak, with hair, beard, and eyes of Southern darkness,” 
Edward Fitzgerald calls him “a man at all points of 
grand proportion and feature, of great strength, straight 
and with broad breast, as if from the army.” Carlyle 
writes to Emerson: 


_ Tennyson came in to us on Sunday evening. A truly interest- 
ng son of earth and son of heaven. One of the finest-looking 
nen in the world. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud 
aughter and piercing wail and all that may be between ; speech 
tnd speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these 
lecades with such company over a pipe, A true human soul, 
1r some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your soul can 
ay, Brother ; a man solitary and sad, as certain men are > dwell- 
ng in an atmosphere of gloom—carrying a bit of chaos about 
im, in short, which he is manufacturing into cosmos. 
4 
_ The sign of chaos was perhaps his unkempt hair, 
hich led the undergraduates of Oxford, when Tenny- 
on received his degree of D. c. L., to salute him with 
€ cry, “ Did your mother call you too early this morn- 
ag, Alfred dear?” He smoked nine hours a day, never 
he same pipe twice ; and when some one spoke of one 


464 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 









of his lines as evidently spontaneous, he merely re 
plied: “I smoked more than twenty pipes over tha 
line.” 

I have said that he was extraordinarily sensitive ti 
criticism. His sensitiveness stood him in good stead, fo 
it led him to criticise himself. ‘‘The’ Lover's Taleg 
printed in 1833, was withdrawn from circulation be 
cause of imperfections pointed out in his other poems 
He seems to have discovered that form with him hay 
dominated substance. Some have found in “ The Lady 
of Shalott’’ the poet’s own confession that he had live 
too long in the world of mere fancy, and that before a 
gave more to the public he needed a larger experiency 
of life. -As, : 


fi 
f 





‘‘T am half-sick of shadows,’’ said 

The Lady of Shalott, ; 

so Tennyson, if he did not “leave the web” anc 
‘leave the loom,” left off for ten whole years all publi 
cation and marketing of his wares. He determined 
that his next work should be as good as he could mak¢« 
it. For one who had already printed such poems al, 
“The Palace of Art,” “The Lotos Eaters,” and “am 
Dream of Fair Women,” this was rigid self-restraint, ¢ 
self-restraint all the more admirable because the poet’; 
external circumstances were narrow and there was con’ 
stant temptation to print for mere pecuniary reward. | 
Virtue was in this case not only its own reward, bui 

it was the unconscious servant of a divine Providence 
For it was the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tenny, 
son’s dearest friend, in 1833, that first shook from him 
the fantastic and unreal element that hindered his 





; SECOND PERIOD OF SUBTLE THOUGHT 465 


growth. Like Samson, Hallam slew more by his death 
‘than by his life. A young man of wonderful powers, 
he still spoke, though dead, through his friend. That 
friend was led to profound meditation upon the realities 
of existence. The world, life, and death, things present 
and things to come, assumed new significance. The 
development of heart and soul which came to John Mil- 
‘ton through experience of outward conflict, came to 
Alfred Tennyson through experience of inward sorrow. 
In the quick sense of personal loss he seemed to lose 
that faith in the order of the world which had uncon. 
sciously been the source of his strength. The recovery 
of this faith was the result of a new apprehension of 
the divine love that pervades the universe. When he 
had seized upon that organific principle, it remade the 
poet as it remade the man. 

The period of dainty grace came thus to be followed 
by the period of subtle thought. Tennyson always 
shunned publicity. The digito monstrart vexed him, as 
much as it troubled Virgil. Unlike Browning, he pre- 
ferred to look upon the struggles of life from the out- 
side. This gives to his poetry a certain academic air. 
Yet he grapples with all the problems of his time, 
though the strength he shows is not that of the Her- 
ules, but that of the Apollo; not that of the club, but 
that of the winged arrow. All his poetical work is an 
ipplication to human. affairs of the principle of divine 
der. This key for him opens all locks. In 1842 he 
bublished «The Princess.” It set forth divine order in 
‘he relation of the sexes, “Locksley Hall” applied 
he same principle to social life; «The Ode on the 
Death of the Duke of Me Saraeectae ” applied it to national 


466 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 








” 


affairs; and “ In Memoriam,” in 1850, applied it to the 
great question of man’s relations to God and immor 
tality. | 
Reserving for a later place in our discussion the the 
ological implications of Tennyson’s poetry, let us for ¢ 
moment consider the manifestations of this principle 0, 
order during the second period of his productive activity 
“The Princess” is a protest against the doctrine tha; 
“marriage is but an old tradition.” It is a half-humor 
ous, half-satirical reassertion of the true relation of mat 
and woman. Byron and Shelley had propounded the 
theory that love is mainly a matter of physical passion) 
They had adopted Goethe’s view that passion is its owl 
justification, and that it may override all obstacles of lay 
or conscience. But the results of this theory are dis) 
astrous to woman, even more than to man. She become), 
man’s victim and slave, while he becomes by his superio| 
strength her tyrant and oppressor. 

Marriage itself is often contracted on man’s part 
the spirit of the tyrant, and when woman discovers thi 
there is a disposition to rebel against the ordinance itself) 
She undervalues love, even if she does not become skep 
tical as to its existence. She perceives that man owe e 
his power in large degree to his superior knowledge, ant 
she fancies that knowledge will enfranchise her. Sh. 
isolates herself, that she may learn. In all this, she for 
gets that she is not man, but woman; that man af 
woman were meant to work together, not in separatioi 
from each other; that the highest knowledge is impos) 
sible without love; that she therefore needs, not les 
love, but more. 

This divine order in the relation of the sexes Tenny, 











ILLUSTRATED IN THE PRINCESS 467 





‘Son sets forth in a mock-heroic medley, where’ the 
‘outward form is drawn from the middle ages, but the 
motive and spirit of the poem from the. life of to- -day. 
Tn Shakespeare’s “ Love’s Labour's Lost,” the king and 
three of his lords withdraw from the world for purposes 
of study ; they bind themselves to see no woman for 
‘three years. Dr. Johnson, in his ‘“ Rasselas,” makes his 
‘princess found a college of learned women, over which 
‘she presides. Tennyson combines the features of both 
‘these schemes. His princess too establishes a univer- 
‘sity, in a certain summer palace of her father’s. It is 
for maidens only, and they are to see no men. Knowl- 
ie she held, 


Was all in all ; they had been, she thought, 
As children ; thiey must lose the child, assume 
The woman ; 


Maintaining that, with equal husbandry, 
The woman were an equal to the man. 


} 


We cannot stay to describe the gradual breaking 
down of all this noble but unnatural enterprise. Ida, 
the Princess, cannot suppress her pity for the Prince 
who loves her. And pity brings love in its train. She 
learns that 


The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink 
l i Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free : 


Let her make herself her own 
To give or keep, to live and learn and be 
All that harms not distinctive womanhood. 
For woman is not undeveloped man, 
But diverse : could we make her as the man, 
Sweet love were slain : his dearest bond is this, 
Not like to like, but like in difference : 


468 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; 

The man be more of woman, she of man ; 

He gain in sweetness and in moral height, 

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, 
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind ; 

Till at the last she set herself to man, 

Like perfect music unto noble words ; 

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, 
Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers, | 
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, 
Self-reverent each, and reverencing each, 
Distinct in individualities, | 
But like each other even as those who love. | 
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men, 

Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm, 
Then springs the crowning race of human kind, 

May these things be! 








It has been said that Tennyson, after all, merges the 
individuality of the Princess in that of the Prince ; that 
there is too little of self-realization in her case; that he) 
mission is conceived of too exclusively as that of accom; 
plishing the Prince’s manhood. We must grant tha’ 
the poet’s ideal woman is of the domestic type. Ir 
‘Locksley Hall,” he says indeed that | 

Woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain— | 
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain 


Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine 
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine. 


But this may be only an instance where the poet pro 
jects himself into a character, and the pessimism 0) 
“Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’? may be, in like 
manner, only the dramatic picture of the fruitage Oo 





i 
| 


| 


ILLUSTRATED IN THE PRINCESS 469 


“early ase dnaaays For fifty years ago, “The Princess”’ 
was an almost startling advocacy of the dignity and 
rights of woman, as it has been ever since a repertory 


of argument and defense of her just claims. 


In the poetry of pure affection, in distinction from 


that of passion, Tennyson is a master. No one more 


movingly than he has described the self-forgetful devo- 
tion with which the happy bride joins her lot to that of 
her husband : 


And on her lover’s arm she leant, 
And round her waist she felt it fold, 
And far across the hills they went 
In that new world which is the old: 


And o’er the hills and far away 
Beyond their utmost purple rim, 
Beyond the night, across the day, 
Through all the world she followed him. 


And King Arthur expresses the true end of a noble 
Marriage when he says: 


Were I joined with her, 
Then might we live together as one life, 
And reigning with one will in everything 
Have power on this dark land to lighten it, 
And power on this dead world to make it live. 


Our poet has done immeasurable service to humanity 
by his maintenance of the sanctity of marriage, on the 
one hand, and of the equality in diversity which is its 
essential nature, on the other. There are no more win- 
ning pictures of its grave and loving union than in 
“Isabel”: 


470 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


The stately flower of female fortitude 
Of perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead ; 


Through all her placid life 
The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife. 


He would give to woman the highest possibilities of! 
education, but would withdraw her from public place 
and work, thus 


Turning to scorn, with lips divine, 
The falsehood of extremes. 


Her true place is that of wife, and her first duty is 
motherhood. The poet’s whole doctrine, indeed, may 
be summed up in the Scripture words: ‘“ Whom God 
hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’’ And) 
the “ Dedication” to his own wife shows that he knew 
not only in theory, but in practice, the blessedness of 
an equal marriage: | 

| 

| 








Dear, near and true—no truer Time himself 
Can prove you, though he make you evermore 
Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life 

Shoots to the fall. 


f 
f 


The same reverence for the divine order appears in 
Tennyson’s treatment of man’s social relations. In) 
“ Locksley Hall,” which has been explained by some as) 
a record of the poet’s own disappointment in love, we 
have a fervid denunciation of the ambitions and the 
conventions which prevent pure natural affection from 
having its way: 


— 


Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth !! 
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth ! 





ILLUSTRATED IN ‘‘LOCKSLEY HALL” A471 


Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule! 
_ Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool ! 


He is never so scathing as when he describes the man 


who sells his daughter to a mercenary marriage. And 


yet no one can have more regard than Tennyson for 
custom and law, for birth and blood, when these repre- 
sent justice and nobility. It is organized society which 


he respects, and of which he is the interpreter. He 


cares little for the individual as a mere individual. 


This is one of the chief distinctions between him and 


Robert Browning. Browning is the poet of the indi- 
vidual soul; he has no sense of corporate interests ; 
society and government matter little to him, or not at 


all. Tennyson looks beyond the single man: man is of 


value only as he is part of an ordered whole far greater 
than himself. 
_ He who has an eye for men in the aggregate is often 


blind to individual misery and wrong. The order of 
Society seems to him’ cheaply purchased by personal 


sacrifice. Tennyson’s love for order made him more 
and more a conservative, while Gladstone’s sympathy 
with individual rights and liberties made him more and 
“More a radical. In his youth the poet could sing of 


|Men my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something 

i new: 

That which they have done but earnest of the things that they 
shall do. 





But he looked at his brothers from afar. He took no 
part in efforts for their legal emancipation. For him 
the only remedy for the evils of competition was more — 
‘competition. He praised and defended Governor Eyre, 


472 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


of Jamaica, when his cruelty was denounced. He took 
no part in the Italian struggle for national unity. He 
was silent when the slave-power of America sought to 
establish itself even to the ruin of the republic. 


These mistakes were misinterpretations of the prin- | 


ciple of order. They can be forgiven, because they 


were exaggerations of a virtue. In a similar manner — 


we must treat the narrow nationalism of Tennyson, 
He is so loyally English that international sympathy is 


practically excluded. His early hope that the world 


might live 


Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battleflags were | 


furled 
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world ; 


Where the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, | 


And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law, 


seems exchanged sixty years after for a darker prospect? 


Warless ? When her tens are thousands, and her thousands mil- | 


lions, then— 
All her harvest all too narrow—who can fancy warless men? 


Warless? War will die out late then. Will it ever, late or soon? ! 
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon? | 


In the meantime he regards war as necessary. In | 
“Maud,” fighting for one’s country seems to atone for | 
private misconduct. And his highest ambition for Eng- | 


land’s colonies is expressed in the words : 


Sons, be welded each and all, 

Into one imperial whole, 

One with Britain, heart and soul, 

One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne! 
Britons, hold your own ! 











| THE DIVINE ORDER AS TO MAN AND GOD 473 





Tennyson is no republican. He is afraid of the 
veople, except as they are governed by the wise and 
‘aithful few. The “red fool-fury-of the Seine” and 
“the blind hysterics of the Celt” arouse in him a pas- 
sion of objurgation which is almost equally hysterical. 
But he has unfailing pride and confidence in sturdy 
English common sense. He trusts the wisdom of the 
past. He chooses for his abode 


A land of settled government, 
A land of old and just renown, 
Where freedom slowly broadens down 
From precedent to precedent. 


And it is because he sees in England the type of a 
divine order, the powers that are ordained of God, that 
he can throw into his patriotic and martial songs such 
exuberant loyalty and devotion. The British empire 
will be stronger forever for such poems as “The De- 
fense of Lucknow,” ‘“.The Charge of the Light Bri- 
yade,” and the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of 














Wellington.” 
_ The greatest work of Tennyson’s second period, how- 
ever, is unquestionably “In Memoriam.” Here the 


oet grapples with the deepest themes, the mysteries 
of sorrow, suffering, and death. He expresses, with a 
cenderness and a yearning unknown before in literature, 
che dull sense of loss; the agonizing regrets, the wild 
rebellion, the tormenting doubts which prey upon one 
whom death has just despoiled of the object of his love. 
But the poem is no mere elegy, like the “ Lycidas mat 
Milton or the “ Adonais” of Shelley; it is the effort of 
the loving soul to give rational account to itself of the 





















474 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


great facts of sin, pain, and grief, and to reconcile them 
with the belief.in God. “In Memoriam ” is not a theo: 
logical discussion, and the poet does not reach his con- 
clusions by pure argument. But he does assert most 
luminously the intuitions of the soul—the conviction 
that there is divine order in the universe, and that 
this order is the result of love: | 
If these brief lays of sorrow born 

Were taken to be such as closed 


Grave doubts and questions here proposed, 
Then these were such as men might scorn. 


Her care is not to part and prove ; 
She takes, when harsher moods remit, 
What slender shade of doubt'may flit, 
And makes it vassal unto love. 


In the way that he intends, Tennyson attains his pur- 
pose. He longs “to prove no lapse of moons cam 
canker love.”” He does prove this to the heart, though 
he cannot prove it to the mere intellect. The various 
doubts that rise with regard to the separate existence of 
the soul after death, its continued consciousness, and its 
affection for those who are left behind, are all dissipated 
by reflections upon the nature and essential immortality’ 
of love. Earthly love is but the transcript and efflux of 
the heavenly. Our loves in higher love endure—a love: 
that embraces us and all. As the poet meditates, he 
finds his own sorrow only a little part of a great world’s 
sorrow, and his own love only a little part of a great 
divine love which would meet that sorrow and would 
turn it into joy. So from individual grief he is led toa 
consciousness of his oneness with all the race, and of! 


f 
his oneness with God himself. a: 
en 





ILLUSTRATED IN ‘‘IN MEMORIAM ”’ Ae 



















I regard “In Memoriam” as the greatest poem of 
yur century, both for substance and for form. It is the 
most representative poem of the age. If Goethe's 
‘Faust ’ reflects the materialism and skepticism of the 
umeteenth century, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam’ ex- 
oresses its faith triumphant over doubt. It is regarded 
vy superficial readers as mournful and prosaic. M. 
Paine thinks it the pretentious monody of a young 
man with new black gloves and_ spotless cambric 
yocket-handkerchief. The Frenchman cannot under- 
itand either the sorrow or the joy. Frederick W. Rob- 
¢xrtson saw deeper into the poem, when he said: “It is 
simply one of the most victorious songs that poet ever 
‘hanted.” 

It is difficult to express in words the value of a poem 
hat demonstrates to the universal heart the divinity 
ind immortality of love. Amid so many claimants for 
‘upremacy—money, power, pleasure, fame—a pure affec- 
jon is in danger of being thrust aside. But love is of 
z0d, and can never die, ‘Your heart,’ says the Psalm- 
st, ‘shall live forever.’ Love can never lose its own; 
hose whom God loves can never cease to be; and those 
vho are one with the God of love can never lose the 
bjects of their affection. Love must grow with our 
rowth, both here and hereafter : 


Regret is dead, but love is more 
Than in the summers that have flown, 
For I myself with these have grown 
To something greater than before. 


If we still love those we lose,” says Thackeray, “can 
ve altogether lose those we love ?”’ 


476 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 










“In Memoriam” is, in the truest sense, a religious 
poem : it aims to soothe and spiritualize grief by takin 
hold of the unseen and eternal. In this respect if 
forms a striking contrast to the “Sonnets” of Shakes 
peare. The “Sonnets” describe such love to a friend 
that Tennyson, in allusion to it, can say: 


I loved thee, Spirit, and love ; nor can 
The soul of Shakespeare love thee more. 


But the love of the “Sonnets” is shadowed with sin and 
shame; that of “In Memoriam” is a pure and lofty 
affection, which ennobles him who cherishes it. Shakes. 
peare’s love never lifts him above the earth. Tenny: 
son’s, from being a power within, becomes a Lord and 
King without, and at last identifies itself with that 


Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 

Believing where we cannot prove. 


“In Memoriam”’ is Tennyson’s “ Paradise Regained,” 
and ‘The Idylls of the King” is his «Paradise Lost.” 
The order in which the works were produced differed’ 
from that of John Milton. But there was advantage in 
it. Only after Tennyson had proved to his own soul, 
that, through all and in all and above all sin and sorrow, 
and death, a divine and immortal order reigned, could) 
he hopefully undertake the story of the world’s down- | 
falland shame. And this is his intent in the « Idylls.— . 
He aims to show how man has broken the divine order, 
to his own undoing. He has written an epic, not of | 
fate, but of free-will; not an allegory, but a parable, of 


THIRD PERIOD OF BROAD HUMANITY Aa77 





















yuman sin and ruin by the abuse of freedom. He him- 
self has called it “the dream of man coming into prac- 
‘ical life, and ruined by one sin.” 

The “Idylls” is the characteristic work of Tennyson’s 
hhird period. As the first was the period of dainty 
xrace, and the second the period of subtle thought, the 
third was the period of broad humanity. No one can 
yass from “In Memoriam”’ to “The Idylls of the King,” 
without feeling that a new note of vigorous simplicity 
was been struck; the former touches us like a marche 
funéebre, but the latter shows the fruits of sorrow in a 
more universal sympathy. Since I have called “The 
dylls’’ Tennyson’s ‘“ Paradise Lost,”’ it will be interest- 
ng to compare the work of our poet with that of John 
Milton. Milton in early life thought seriously of taking 
he story of King Arthur for the subject of an epic. 
in Tennyson’s story, as in Milton’s, it is the fault of a 
voman, and she the best beloved, that brings destruc- 
jon to her husband.: Milton’s epic is in parts more 
lramatic, original, and sublime than Tennyson’s, but 
he latter is the superior in sustained beauty. Milton 
s in long passages stiff and prosaic, while our poet is 
ways graceful, and never dull. 

King Arthur and his Round Table furnish us with a 
urious illustration of the nature of the myth, and of its 
ower to survive and grow and improve through many 
ransformations. It is highly probable that some en- 
ightened chief of the Britons, after the Roman power 
iad been broken, sought to defend his island from Norse 
nvasion, and to perpetuate a Christian civilization. But 
hose were barbarous times; his helpers were few ; op- 
osing forces both within and without were too mighty 


) 


—— 


\ 




























478 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


to be subdued ; internal treachery and external assault 
brought his fair scheme to ruin, and himself to death, 
Yet his name remained. Around it gathered popular 
conceptions of gentleness and purity and honor. The 
story of Arthur and his knights was told in many ways, 
Each generation manufactured its own drapery. The 
age of chivalry clothed it with all the paraphernalia of 
the tournament and the banquet hall. | 

The legend of the Holy Grail became mixed with it. 
There had been a heathen story of an enchanted castle! 
whose inmates preserved a perpetual youth by feeding 
from a vessel dedicated to one of the Celtic gods. The: 
turning of the pagan temple at Glastonbury into aj 
church perhaps gave a Christian interpretation to the) 
legend. The holy vessel became the symbol of the! 
mass. The Grail was the cup in which was preserved’ 
the blood of Christ, of which if one drink he shall never 
die. Joseph of Arimathea had brought to Britain the| 
very cup used at the Last Supper. To see the red 
blood throbbing within the cup was granted only as the 
reward of long service to Christ and the church. 4 

Sir Thomas Malory collected these stories and wove! 
them into one whole. Tennyson has availed himself of 
the work of Malory. But, in the very spirit of the) 
legends themselves, he has not scrupled to omit, to’ 
interpret, to add, whenever he could thus adapt the 
material more perfectly to his purpose. He has made 
King Arthur an impeccable saint, although the original 
legend makes his heroic sacrifices to be expiatory in 
their nature—the effort to atone for earlier sin. Swin- | 
burne laughs at our poet’s regard for the proprieties, 
and calls Arthur “a prig.”’ But Tennyson has dom 


| BHEGIDYLLS OF CTH KING | 479 























well to make the King a model of virtue, and his poem 
1 Christian, rather than a Greek, tragedy. The sad suc- 
sess of evil in frustrating the hopes of the good appeals 
more strongly to the heart of this age than any of Mr. 
Swinburne’s pagan exhibitions of the natural develop- 
nent of vice. 

The hero of the “Idylls” is no mere allegorical phan- 
om, like those of Spenser’s “ Fairie Queene.” Dr. Van 
Dyke has rightly pointed this out to us. The hero is a 
iving, breathing human being instead. And yet he is at 
che same time the parabolic representation of the soul of 
man, coming out of the unknown eternity that is past, 
0 live its life, fight its fight, undergo its probation, and 
hen departing, as it had come, into the unknown eter- 
lity that is before it. It is here, in this narrow earthly 
*xistence, to stand for the true and the right, to shed 
tbroad the light of a noble example, to wage war upon 
he sensual and the selfish, and to put them down. It 
egins with lofty hopes. Youth and love think all 
hings possible. As King Arthur is the symbol of man 
n his freedom, so his knights are symbols of man’s 
sowers—courage and intellect, purity and justice, truth 
ind loyalty. For a time all goes well. There seems 
rood prospect that the soul will set up a kingdom of 
ighteousness, a restored Eden, upon earth. 

What are the hindrances? First, man’s sensual appe- 
ites. The story of Lancelot and Guinevere is the story 
if passion dethroning faith, of secret sin wasting all the 
owers of the soul within and bringing to naught all 
he noblest possibilities of achievement without. One 
‘vil example corrupts the court, until only three or four 
if Arthur’s helpers are left untainted. And the second 


480 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


hindrance is that wild asceticism which is the opposite 
extreme to license, and which in the end only makes. 
license more licentious. The knights resolve to go in 
quest of the Holy Grail. \ Percivale tells the story: 


Then on a summer night it came to pass, 
While the great banquet lay along the hall, 
That Galahad would sit down in Merlin’s chair, 


And all at once, as there we sat, we heard 

A cracking and a riving of the roofs, 

And rending, and a blast, and overhead 
Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. 

And in the blast there smote along the hall 

A beam of light seven times more clear than day: 
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail 
All over cover’d with a luminous cloud, 

And none might see who bare it, and it past. 
But every knight beheld his fellow’s face 

As in a glory, and all the knights arose, 

And staring at each other like dumb men 
Stood, till I found a voice and sware a vow. 





I sware a vow before them all, that I, 
Because I had not seen the Grail, would ride 
A twelvemonth and a day in quest of it, 
Until I found and saw it, as the nun 


[ 
| 


— 


My sister saw it ; and Galahad sware the vow, 
And good Sir Bors, our Lancelot’s cousin sware, 
And Lancelot sware, and many among the knights, 
And Gawain sware, and louder than the rest. 


King Arthur has been absent on some chivalrous | 
essay to rid his realm of injustice. He does not take 1 
the vow. When he returns, he can only mourn the rash I 
decision of his knights. He has lost their help, and 
they, as he well knows, enter upon a vain search, with” 








MAN IS RUINED BY ONE SIN 481 





nothing certain but disappointment and demoralization. 
He can only say: 


Go, for your vows are sacred, being made: 
Yet—for ye know the cries of all my realm 

Pass through this hall—how often, O my knights, 
Your places being vacant by my side, 

This chance of noble deeds will come and go 
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires 
Lost in the quagmire ! 


And it is even as he predicts. The Round Table is 
broken up. The return of the knights is the signal for 
a corruption that leaves almost no one pure. The sin 
of Lancelot and Guinevere is made public. The guilty 
wife flees to the convent at Amesbury, while Arthur 
ends his life in battle upon the misty western shore, 
and on the dusky barge tended by the three queens, 
Faith, Hope, and Love, 





From the great deep to the great deep he goes. 


‘So the poet has given us a picture of a lost cause. 
Disaster and defeat have overtaken the truth. Evil 
seems to have triumphed. This victory of evil would 
oe fatal to the success of the “Idylls” as an epic, if 
‘here were not a background of good. I have tried to 
show that though we have here Tennyson’s “ Paradise 
Lost,’’ we have in “In Memoriam” Tennyson’s “ Para- 
lise Regained.”’ The pathos of the “Idylls” is not the 
yathos of pessimism. To this disorder which man has 
rought a nobler divine order shall succeed. The evil 
shall somehow be made to minister to good, and all 


quman faithfulness, though it may seem to fail of its 
2F 








482 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 






purpose here, shall be seen at last to have triumphed 
even in the article of death. 


| 


O yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 


That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 

When God hath made the pile complete. 













Sa at awe eawaess 


It has been my purpose to discuss, and even to men: 
tion, the separate poems of Tennyson only as this might | | 
prepare the way for the consideration of his theology. 
But, before I leave the third period of his work, the 
period of broad humanity, I must briefly notice the 
dramas. Oi these** The Cup, “Them Halconss “The | 
Promise of May,” and “ The Foresters,’”’ may be passa 
by, as of no particular significance, except to demon-— 
strate the poet’s lack of supreme dramatic genius. They 
are slight and fanciful studies of character, which might | 
better have been put into the form of monologue than | 
into that of drama. Our poet is more descriptive than | 
creative. He finds it difficult to invent situations, to | 
diversify action, to represent passion as expressing itself i. 
in life, to make the scene supply motive and explain | 
speech. While Shakespeare never lets our attention — 


’ 


atively little movement. $: 
Wctine ‘ Harold, Matte Becket, $ and ‘Queen Mary,” a FA 

























HIS THEOLOGY INFLUENCED BY AGNOSTICISM 483 


upon the stage. They constitute a trilogy, the com- 
mon subject of which is “The Making of England.” 
“Harold” depicts the conflict between Saxon and Nor- 
man; “Becket” the struggle between church and 
srown ; “‘Queen Mary” the fight between Protestantism 
ind Rome. They are invaluable pictures of three great 
srises in English history. Freeman declared that the 
d0et’s insight and imagination had made comprehensible 
0 him certain intricacies of those old times, as his own 
itudies had never done. George Eliot said that «Ten- 
lyson’s plays run Shakespeare’s close.’ And Hutton, 
ur greatest English critic, ranks “Queen Mary,” in 
lramatic force and general power, higher even than 
dhakespeare’s “ King Henry the Eighth.” 


In passing to the consideration of Tennyson’s the- 
logical opinions, let me sum up what precedes. | The 
iscussion thus far has shown us, not only that our poet 
elieves in God and’ in a divine order in the universe, 
ut that these beliefs are fundamental to his whole 
ystem of thought. His view of the dignity of poetry 
i based upon them. They enter into his conception of 
e relation of man to woman, of man to his fellow-man, 
f man to government, and of man to God.! A more 
nipresent theistic spirit it would he difficult to find 
the works of any poet. For this reason I regret all 
l€ more that in Tennyson’s utterances about God, he 
is so largely fallen in with methods of expression de- 
ved from the agnostic school of modern thinkers. 

Let us remember the days in which his poetry had 
§ origin. From 1830 to 1860 the philosophy of Sir 
‘illiam Hamilton was the current one in England. 


oe 


484 FOETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Mansel showed its implications in his “ Limits of Re- 
ligious Thought,” and Herbert Spencer took advantage 
of it to proclaim that the Ultimate Reality is inscru- 
table. In spite of the Scripture declarations that “he: 
that loveth God knoweth God,” “the pure in heart 

. shall see God,” “this is life eternal, that they | 
should know thee, the only true God,’ many Christian) 
thinkers seemed ready to return to heathen ignorance, | 
and to build an altar “To An Unknown God.” Instead) 
of taking Jesus at his word, “He that hath seen me) 
hath seen the Father,” and so attributing to God the 
characteristics of Jesus, they made Jesus’ revelation a 
proof that God is essentially incognizable to finite intel- 
ligences. 

I find much of this agnosticism in Tennyson. In the) 
introduction to “In Memoriam” we read: | 





We have but faith : we cannot know; 
For knowledge is of things we see ; 
And yet we trust it comes from thee, 

A beam in darkness : let it grow. 


knowledge: since science is knowledge, such matters 
cannot be objects of science, and there is no science of 
theology. The poet adopts the vicious principle that 
knowledge is only of sensuous phenomena and their, 
relations: supersensible things must be apprehended by) 
faith, and faith is not knowledge at all. Henry Drum- 
mond challenged this whole method of representation | 
when he said that faith in the New Testament is op-| 
posed, not to reason, but to sight. Faith is a higher 
sort of knowledge. It is an act of reason, of reason in 


Here is a denial that matters of religion are objects " 











FAITH IS SUNDERED FROM KNOWLEDGE 485 














the sense of the mind’s whole power of knowing, of 
eason therefore as conditioned upon a right state of the 
affections. Faith then is the higher knowledge possessed 
by the loving heart and the upright will. 

Yet in his use of the words knowledge and faith 
Tennyson is not consistent. When it comes to appre- 
hension of the inward world, even though this is super- 
sensible, he calls it knowledge. And at times the soul 
knows God as it knows itself : 


Let visions of the night or of the day 

Come, as they will ; and many a time they come, 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
This air that smites his forehead is not air 

But vision—yea, his very hand and foot— 

In moments when he feels he cannot die, 

And knows himself no vision to himself, 

Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 

Who rose again. 


But his wrong conception of faith, as somehow sundered 
from knowledge, leads the poet to divest God to a large 
extent of cognizable attributes, and to clothe him with 
a mist of words in which all definiteness is lost. To 
Christian hearts that say “Our Father, who art in 
eaven,’ it seems chilling as well as tantalizing to hear 
che prayer at the close of “ De Profundis” : 
Hallowed be Thy name—Halleluiah ! 

Infinite Ideality ! 

Immeasurable Reality ! 


Infinite Personality ! 
Hallowed be Thy name—Halleluiah ! 


We feel we are nothing—for all is Thou and in Thee ; 
We feel we are something—“¢/az also has come from Thee: 


486 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


We know we are nothing—but Thou wilt help us to be. 
Hallowed be Thy name—Halleluiah ! 















| 

I call the reader to witness, however, that this is no. 
pantheistic prayer. Pantheism denies the separate ex. 
istence and personality of God. This prayer calls God 
a Personality, and implies the continued and distinct 
existence and personality of man also. It is an expres. 
sion, though in our judgment not a highly poetical or 
impressive expression, of the doctrine of Paul that in 
God “we live and move and have our being.” There 
is unquestionably in Tennyson the belief that man is an_ 
emanation from God. “The great deep” from which 
King Arthur comes and to which he goes is not simply 
the deep of eternity, it is also the deep of the divine | 
existence. So, in “ De Profundis,” written at the birth 
of his son, the poet writes: Bi 


Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
From that true world within the world we see, 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore— 
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep, 

With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun 
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy. 


For in the world which is not ours They said 

«‘Let us make man,’’ and that which should be man, 
From that one light no man can look upon, 

Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons 

And all the shadows. 


The thought of this derivation of the soul from God | 
and of its essential oneness with its divine original, is _ 
found in Tennyson’s earliest poems, it crops out in the — 
works of his middle life, and it persists in those printed — 
just before his death. One may say indeed that this 


THE SOUL IS AN EMANATION FROM GOD 487 






view of the dignity of human nature is inseparable from 
his conception of a universal divine order: there is 
order, because there is one substance at the basis of all 
beings and all things. ‘The Two Voices” suggests 
that life may exist after the soul is sundered from the 
body, because we have faint reminiscences of a state 
prior to the soul’s existence in a body. 


Yet how should I for certain hold, 
Because my memory is so cold, 
That I first was in human mold? 


Much more, if first I floated free, 
As naked essence, must I be 
Incompetent of memory : 


For memory dealing but with time, 
And he with matter, could she climb 
Beyond her own material prime ? 


Moreover something is or seems, 
That touches me with mystic gleams, 
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams— 


Of something felt, like something here ; 
Of something done, I know not where ; 
Such as no language may declare. 


The beginning of a human life is described in the 
Epilogue to “In Memoriam”: 


A soul shall draw from out the vast 
And strike his being into bounds, 


And moved through life of lower phase, 
Result in man, be born and think, 
And act and love. 


488 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 









Our life in time and space is necessary to our separat 
personality : 
So rounds he to a separate mind 
From whence clear memory may begin, 


As through the frame that binds him in 
His isolation grows defined. 


This use may lie in blood and breath, 
Which else were fruitless of their due, 
Had man to learn himself anew 

Beyond the second birth of Death. 


ing this personality. In “The Higher Pantheism” we 
read : | ‘ 


Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ? 


Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why ; ‘4 
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel ««I am I’’? u 


Man’s life is from God and in God, yet he feels his own 
distinctness and responsibility. “The Ancient Sage” 
recognizes both the oneness with God and the differ 
ence from God: .. 


But that one ripple on the boundless deep 
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself 
Forever changing form, but ever more 

One with the boundless motion of the deep. 


And lest we should say that the wave is but the form | 
and manifestation of the ocean, and can have no real 
separateness or freedom, Tennyson tells us in “De Pro- | 
fundis”’ that God wrought 


YET TENNYSON IS NO PANTHEIST 489 


Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, 
But this main-miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world. 











And in his address “To the Duke of Argyll” he 
speaks of the will as 


A power to make 
This ever-changing world of circumstance, 
In changing, chime with never-changing Law. 


“The Higher Pantheism” then is no pantheism at 
all, for it asserts that both God and man are distinct 
personalities, and that God is not confined to the uni- 
verse but is transcendent above it. There are yet fur- 
ther proofs that Tennyson is no pantheist, first, in his 
doctrine of prayer; secondly, in his doctrine of con- 
science ; and thirdly, in his doctrine of the soul’s sepa- 
rate existence after death. The last words of King 
Arthur give us the doctrine of prayer: 


Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 

That nourish a blind life within the brain, 

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 

Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 
For so the whole round earth is every way 

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 


n other words, the poet believes in intercourse and com- 
munion between man and God, such as can occur only 
between separate persons, and such as excludes all pan- 
theistic confounding of one personality with the other. 


490 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet— 


Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. j 


The commands and the reproaches of conscience are 
a witness against pantheism. If man has no separate 
personality, but is a waif upon an infinite stream, what 
sense in talking to him of right or wrong? Whatever 
is, is right; pleasure and duty are one. But we find 
Tennyson asserting the claims of conscience over 
against pleasure: 


Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 
Yet not for power (power of herself 

Would come uncalled for) but to live by law, 
Acting the law we live by without fear ; 
And, because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. | 











Arthur's knights bind themselves “to reverence their ; 
conscience as their king.” As the demand of con- 
science indicates a personal Lawgiver, so the pangs of | 
conscience indicate a personal Judge, and to Lancelot in 
his sin the Holy Grail has 





a stormy glare, a heat 
As from a seven times heated furnace, 


which blasts and burns and blinds him, with such 
fierceness that he swoons away. | 

Nor is man absorbed in God even after this earthly life 
is ended. ‘In Memoriam” gives us Tennyson’s doc- | 
trine of the soul’s separate existence after death: 


That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds and, fusing all 





PERSONALITY PERSISTS AFTER DEATH 491 





The skirts of self again, should fall 
| f Remerging in the general Soul, 
i" 


iq Is faith as vague as all unsweet : 
| Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside ; 
: And I shall know him when we meet : 


And we shall sit at endless feast, 
Enjoying each the other's good : 
What vaster dream can hit the mood 

Of Love on earth ? 


And Mr. Knowles, in “The Nineteenth Century” 
(January, 1893), writes of Tennyson: “He formulated 
‘once and quite deliberately his own religious creed in 
the words: ‘There is a Something that watches over 
us; and our individuality endures ; that’s my faith, and 
that’s all my faith!’ ” 

; But in his poems the spirit of the seer possesses him, 
and he asserts a larger and more definite creed: 


I trust I have not wasted breath : 
I think we are not wholly brain, 
Magnetic mockeries ; not in vain, 
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death ; 


Not only cunning casts in clay : 
Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men, 
At least to me? I would not stay. 


Let him, the wiser man who springs 
Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
His action like the greater ape ; 

But I was Jorn to better things. 


Let it live then—ay, till when? 
Earth passes, all is lost 





492 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 





In what they prophesy, our wise men, 
Sun-flame or sunless frost, | 

And deed and song alike are swept 
Away, and all. in vain : 

As far as man Can see, except | 
The man himself remain ; 

And though, in this lean age forlorn, 
Too many a voice may cry 

That man can have no after-morn, 
Not yet of these am I. 

The man remains, and whatsoe’ er 
He wrought of good or brave 

Will mold him through the cycle-year 
That dawns behind the grave. 





Gone forever! Ever? no—for since our dying race began, 
Ever, ever, and forever, was the leading light of man. 


And yet, in spite of these testimonies to immortality, 
there are expressions in Tennyson which might seem to) 
teach that the souls of the departed are so merged in 
God that all bounds and limitations are lost. Let us) 
interpret these expressions by the clearer passages whi 
we have already examined. The poet means only that 
his dead friend is now one with God, and that this one-. 
ness with God brings with it a lifting of the soul above! 
the hindrances of space and time. ~That dead friend 
had himself said: “The tendency of love is toward a. 
union so intimate as virtually to amount to identifica- 
tion.” Arthur is now inseparable from the divine. All 
his powers are expanded beyond our earthly measures. 
All things are his, because God is his and the infinite, 
fullness of God’s love. i | 

We do not call Milton a pantheist because he ad- 
dresses Lycidas as ‘the Genius of the shore.”’ Shelley) 














A PERSONAL EXISTENCE BEFORE BIRTH 493 


is not a pantheist merely because Adonais is “ made one 
with Nature” and “his voice is in all her music.” No 
| . e . 

more is Tennyson a pantheist when he writes: 


Thy voice is on the rolling air ; 
I hear thee where the waters run ; 
Thou standest in the rising sun, 
And in the setting thou art fair. 


What art thou then? I cannot guess; 
But though I seem in star and flower 
To feel thee some diffusive power, 

I do not therefore love thee less : 


My love involves the love before ; 

My love is vaster passion now ; 

Though mixed with God and Nature thou, 
I seem to love thee more and more. 


Far off thou art, but ever nigh ; 
I have thee still, and I rejoice ; 
I prosper, circled with thy voice ; 
I shall not lose thee though I die. 


He evidently holds that, though it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be, and though an inconceivable greatness 
is before us, we are not to lose our separate being, or to 
lose the personal loves that have made that being so 
Birscly what it is. Man’s personality will endure after 
this life is over. 

_ But another interesting question arises: Did the soul 
have separate personality before it entered this world of 
time and space? I cannot believe that Tennyson means 
i imply this, for the reason that the soul’s conscious- 
ness of its personality and the exercise of its freedom 


are made to depend upon its finite surroundings. He 
| 


494 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 





can speak of “the abysmal depths of personality,” be- 
cause our being is inseparable from God’s being, even 
as it is originally derived from him. But that this soul 
existed, as soul, before its birth into this present life, 
the poet nowhere asserts. 

There are frequent intimations, indeed, that we re- 
member what was before our birth. I have quoted | 
verses from “The Two Voices,” which can be inter- 
preted in no other way. “The Ancient Sage” is the 
attempt of the poet to give us the wisdom of his later 
years : 


To-day? but what of yesterday? for oft . 
On me, when boy, there came what then I call’d... 
In my boy-phrase ‘‘The Passion of the Past,’’ 
The first gray streak of earliest summer dawn, 
Desolate sweetness—far and far away. 





One of the loveliest of his songs is made up of these: 
“deep musings and tender broodings over the past, and 
not the past of human life alone, for many of them are | 
echoes of some antenatal dream”’: 


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depths of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 

In looking on the happy autumn fields, 

And thinking of the days that are no more. 





Dear as remembered kisses after death, 

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d 
On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
O Death in Life, the days that are no more! 






A PERSONAL EXISTENCE BEFORE BIRTH 495 


| 
a one of his latest songs takes up the same myste- 


ous strain : 


| ; What sight so lured him through the fields he knew 
t As where earth’s green stole into heaven’s own hue, 
Far—far—away ? 


- What sound was dearest in his native dells ? 
The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells 
Far—far—away. 


5 What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy, 
i Through those three words would haunt him when a boy 
Far—far—away ? 





A whisper from his dawn of life? A breath 
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death 
Far—far—away ? 


Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth, 
The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth, 
Far—far—away ? 


What charm in words, a charm no words could give? 
O dying words, can Music make you live? 
Far—far—away ? 


- An occasional critic holds indeed that the belief in 
man’s conscious and responsible existence before he 
Came into this present world is found in the « Epi- 
logue” to the “ Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Bala- 


But since our mortal shadow, III, 
To waste this earth began— 
Perchance from some abuse of Will 
In worlds before the man 
Involving ours—he needs must fight, 
To make true peace his own, 
He needs must combat might with might, 
Or Might would rule alone. 


496 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER [ 


But I think it plain that the poet here has in mind not. 
an antenatal sin of man, but an antehuman sin of Satan, 

The “abuse of will” is “in worlds before the na 

and is regarded as only indirectly “involving ours.” 

We are left then to the conclusion that Tennyson’s 
reminiscences are, like Wordsworth’s, survivals of a 

knowledge possessed in a previous state of existence, | 
not by the separate soul, but by the divine Being from: 
whom it has subsequently sprung. 

But in one very important respect Tennyson’s doc- 
trine is unlike Wordsworth’s and is inferior to it. i 
refer to his conception of nature. Stopford Brooke, in’ 
his noble and almost exhaustive treatment of Tenays | 
son and his poetry, has nowhere shown greater penetra- | 
tion than where he calls attention to the marked differ- | 
ence between his view of the physical universe, includ- 
ing the human body, and the view of Wordsworth, 
The difference is simply this: To Wordsworth nature is | 
alive, and alive with God. “The splendor in the grass, 
the glory in the flower,” are but the outward sign, the | 
intelligible speech, of an immanent Deity. Nature can | 
therefore be regarded with affection, and the soul can. 
commune with her. She responds to the heart of man, | 
counsels him, inspires him. The lonely forest and the’ 
sounding shore teach him great lessons of wisdom, for | 
in nature’s quiet or in her majesty he hears the voice of | 
God. 

To Tennyson, on the other hand, nature is rather a’ 
phantasmagoria cunningly arranged to witness of an) 
absent God. There is no life in nature, and specially | 
no divine life. The only life in the universe, outside of 
God, is found in the soul of man. Nature is but a 










THE POET'S CONCEPTION OF NATURE 497 


“series of pictures or symbols, intended to instruct and 
_to educate, but never revealing a present Divinity. I 
| am inclined to connect this view of nature with Tenny- 
“son’s general tendency to agnosticism. In this respect 
I think both Wordsworth and Browning far more vigor- 
“ous and pronounced believers than Tennyson. And 
this agnosticism is accompanied by an idealism more 
subjective than Browning’s, an idealism that at times 
“seems to doubt the real existence of any world but that 
of feeling and of thought. 
_ The world is not so much the immediate product of 
a present God as it is the shadow of a God who is far 
‘away: 


Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by, 
‘Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye, 


Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, through the human 
soul ; 


Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the whole. 


In fact, this picture or shadow of the Infinite One does 
mot answer to the Reality except in part. Nature, 
Owing to our imperfect vision, is a distorted image of 
Him who is reflected in it: 


My God, I would not live 
Save that I think this gross, hard-seeming world 
Is our misshaping vision of the Powers 
Behind the world, that make our griefs our gains, 


Our mortal veil 
And shatter’d phantom of that infinite One, 
Who made thee unconceivably Thyself 


Out of His whole World-self and all in all. 
2G 





498 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER | 


I cannot understand the least flower that blows; but 
such is the order of the universe, that knowledge of 
that one flower, if I only did possess it, would be knowl- 
edge of all: 


Little flower—but zf I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is. 





Tennyson made it no secret to his friends that from _ 
boyhood, sometimes when he was all alone and some. | 
times when he was in the presence of others, he had 
been subject to a sort of waking trance. Four times in 
“The Princess” he describes such a one: 


And truly waking dreams were, more or less, | 
An old and strange affection of the house, | 
Myself too had weird seizures, heaven knows what : 
On a sudden, in the midst of men and day, 

And while I walk’d and talk’d as heretofore, 

I seem’d to move among a world of ghosts 

And feel myself the shadow of a dream. 


The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard, 
The jest and earnest working side by side, 

The cataract and the tumult of the Kings, 
Were shadows ; and the long fantastic night 
With all its doings had and had not been, 

And all things were and were not. 


‘In Memoriam ” tells of another: 


So word by word, and line by line, 
The dead man touched me from the past, 
And all at once it seemed at last 

The living soul was flashed on mine, 





‘s THE WORLD IS A SHADOW-WORLD 499 


And mine in his was wound, and whirl’ d 
ie About empyreal heights of thought, 
| ! And came on that which is, and caught 
| The deep pulsations of the world, 


fZonian music measuring out 
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance— 
The blows of Death. 


And similarly in “The Ancient Sage” we read: 


For more than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
The word that is the symbol of myself, 
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 
And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs, the limbs 
Were strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt, 
But utter clearness, and through loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match’d with ours 
Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world. 










A shadow-world, especially when that world of shad- 
ows only imperfectly answers to the Reality, affords no 
object of communion. It is only the dim symbol of 
Him who dwells behind the darkness and the shadow— 
it is never the manifestation of a present God. Yet I 
must make a single exception, one which has doubtless 
decurred to the reader, namely, the remarkable poem 
entitled “ The Higher Pantheism.”” Here, for a moment, 
the poet is endowed with Wordsworth’s deeper Sane 
nd actually sees God in nature: 


The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains, 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him that reigns? 


500 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


But the vision does not tarry. Tennyson has hardly 
expressed the sublime thought when doubt again seizes 
him. The vision is a misleading vision, true only to us 
and only while the vision lasts : 


Is not the Vision He? Though He be not that which he seems: 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams? 


Here is the old Kantian relativity. All knowledge is 
relative to the knowing agent. Tennyson is not con- 
tent with knowing the Reality zz the phenomena; he is 
trying to know the Reality apart from the phenomena, 
trying to know without fulfilling the conditions of 
knowledge, in short, trying to know without knowing. 
Agnosticism regards God as concealed by his own mant- 
festation—it should hold instead that in knowing the 
phenomena we know the Reality itself. Our poet is 
infected with this agnostic philosophy ; and, though he 
has a moment of insight when the truth dawns upon 
him, the clouds shut in again; though he listens for a 
little to the wise, the unwise must have their say also: 


God is law, say the wise ; O soul, and let us rejoice, 
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice. 
Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool ; 


For all we have power to see is astraight staff bent in a pool. 


And so the conclusion is a mixture of faith and of unbe 
lief : 


And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not He? 


Would that the poet had grasped the principle that 
the laws of, our knowing are not merely arbitrary and 





2 THE WORLD IS A SHADOW-WORLD 501 


“regulative, but correspond to the nature of things ! 
But he did not grasp this principle, and Nature re- 
‘mained to him a sort of dream, in which God mani- 
fested himself indeed, but only distantly and irregularly. 
Tennyson therefore does not care to be alone with 
Nature. Only when some fellow-man is by, has he 
interest in physical beauty or in physical grandeur. 
The external universe is only the setting for humanity, 
the background for the human figure. But, with man to 
‘interpret, the world has a meaning. Our poet’s greatest 
| art, indeed, consists in finding a fitting environment for 
every emotion of the soul. He can create, not dramatic 
Scenes, but material landscapes, to reflect, symbolize, and 
intensify every phase of thought and emotion. 

I venture to give one out of many possible illustra- 
‘tions of Tennyson’s use of nature, not as a living, but 
as a symbolic thing. He makes nature express other- 
wise unutterable yearnings in his little poem: 


Break, break, break, 
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea ! 

And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 


The dull recurrence of the wave-beats answers to heart- 
beats even more monotonous and sad. And now the 
poet heightens the impression of grief by contrast: 


O well for the fisherman’s boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play ! 
O well for the sailor lad, © 

That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 


And the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill ; 





502 POETRY INTERPRETS- THE DIVINE ORDER 


But O for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still ! 


So the glad accomplishment of the voyage of the ship 
increases our sympathy with one whose earthly hopes. 
have vanished. And the last stanza intimates that, 


while the wave-beats are mechanical and unconscious, 
the heart-beats are living and unescapable : : 


Break, break, break, | 
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea ! 

But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me. 


A divine order, and finite intelligences watched over 
by an infinite Intelligence who uses nature for their) 
instruction and discipline—this is Tennyson’s faith, | 
His idealism, combined with his belief in freedom, de- | 
livers him from the materialistic error of supposing that | 
the universe is sufficient unto itself. He recognizes} 
the world as under the dominion of law. In his later 
years he was increasingly impressed with the evidence | 
that evolution is the method of creation. But he | 
never loses sight of the fact that there is a law within | 
the law, namely, the will of God. He sees that evolu | 









method is a divine Intelligence which designed it ; that | 
the Agent who works according to this method is God. | 

Tennyson made many needless concessions to agnostt- | 
cism, but he never ceased to fight against materialism. | 
In his acknowledgment of law, he did not surrender | 
his faith in freedom. He believed that God, while 


binding nature fast in fate, 
Left free the human will. 


ie 


SS 


AN EVOLUTIONIST, BUT NOT A MATERIALIST 503 


_ God's order is the order, not of constant miracle, but 


of gradual development. But God is free, as well as 


man; and this enabled him to trust that 


God was love indeed, 
And love creation’s final law— 
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shrieked against his creed. 


This enabled him also to cherish hope for the world, 
_ even though many questions about the existence of evil 
_remained unsolved : 


| Is there evil but on earth? Or pain in every peopled sphere? 


| Well be grateful for the sounding watchword ‘‘Evolution’’ here. 


_ Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, 


And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud. 


Tennyson had evidently grasped the thought that the 
abuse of human freedom has substituted reversion for 


evolution, and that sin must be taken account of, if we 


_would explain the history of man or reconcile it with 


the principle of divine order. The materialism that 


denies freedom, and the necessitarianism that excludes 
sin, are combated in the drama called “The Promise 


of May.” At the first representation of this little play 


-in London, the Marquis of Queensberry rose from his 


seat in the theatre and protested against the character 
of “Edgar” as “an abominable caricature” of the ag- 


nostic position. It is nevertheless a faithful picture of 


the logical tendency and natural consequences of ag- 


nosticism : 





¢ 


A soul with no religion. . . 
Was without rudder, anchor, compass—might be 


504 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Blown every way with every gust, and wreck 
On any rock. 


If man be only 
A willy-nilly current of sensations— 
Reaction needs must follow revel—yet— 
Why feel remorse, he, knowing that he must have 
Moved in the iron grooves of Destiny ? 
Remorse then is a part of Destiny, 
Nature a liar, making us feel guilty 
Of her own faults. 


The last gleam of an after-life but leaves him 
A beast of prey in the dark. 


The two aspects of this abuse of freedom, the sin of 
sense on the one hand and the sin of pride on the other, 
have been depicted by Tennyson with wonderful power, 
the former in “The Vision of Sin,” and the latter in 
«The Palace of Art.” Not that he confines his treat- 
ment of the subject to these poems. As I have already 
pointed out, “The Idylls of the King” is one long ex- 
position of the nature and the consequences of trans- 
gression. The song of Vivien in “Balin and Balan” 
gives us the insidious and lying aspect of temptation: 


The fire of heaven is lord of all things good, 
And starve not thou this fire within thy blood, 
But follow Vivien through the fiery flood ! 
The fire of heaven is not the flame of hell! 


“Thou shalt not surely die,” said the first seducer ; 


“ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil.” So | 


Vivien extorts the charm from Merlin: 


Then, in one moment, she put forth the charm 
Of woven paces and of waving hands, 








SIN AS SENSUALITY 505 


/ And in the hollow oak he lay as dead, 
And lost to life and use and name and fame. 


“The Vision of Sin” presents temptation to sensual 
sin in its coarser aspect: 


I had a vision when the night was late : 

A youth came riding toward a palace-gate. 

He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown, 
But that his heavy rider kept him down. 

And from the palace came a child of sin, 

And took him by the curls and led him in. 


Then come song and revel, ecstasies of pleasure, the 
giddy whirl of the dance, an orgy of intoxication. But 
there is a solemn sequel. Divine retribution slowly 
gathers: 


And then I looked up toward a mountain tra°%t, 
That girt the region with high cliff and lawn ; 
I saw that every morning, far withdrawn 
Beyond the darkness and the cataract, 
God made himself an awful rose of dawn, 
Unheeded : and detaching, fold by fold, 
From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near, 
A vapor heavy, hueless, formless, cold, 
Came floating on for many a month and year 
Unheeded. 
| : 
At length the vapor touches the palace-gate and en- 
compasses its inmates. Penalty overtakes th> sinner. 
The youth with curls, fairly flying in the exubi t2nce of 


his vitality and passion, becomes at last 


A gray and gap-tooth’d man as lean as deal 
Who slowly rode across a wither’ d heath 
And lighted at a ruin’d inn. 


506 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 







Sense has increased the stimulant until at last no 
pleasure is left. The recklessness of youth is now a 
bitter cynicism. There is no goodness or purity. Death 
is approaching, but it is made matter for ribald ‘jest. 
Conscience occasionally threatens, but it can be deadened 
with drink: 





I am old, but let me drink; 

Bring me spices, bring me wine ; 
I remember, when I think, 

That my youth wgs half divine, 
Youthful hopes, by scores, to all, 

When the locks are crisp and curl’d; 
Unto me my maudlin gall 

And my mockeries of the world. 


Fill the cup, and fill the can ; 
Mingle madness, mingle scorn ! 

Dregs of life, and lees of man: 
Yet we will not die forlorn ! 





The voice grew faint : there came a further change : 
Once more uprose the mystic mountain range. 


Then some one spake : ‘‘ Behold, it was a crime 
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time.”’ 
Another said : ‘‘ The crime of sense became 
The crime of malice, and is equal blame.”’ 


Penalty is the reaction of natural law, and the sin of 
sense is punished in kind. Man reaps what he sows, 
yet the operation of natural law is at the same time the 
revelation of the righteous judgment of God. 

As “The Vision of Sin” shows us sensual sin) 
“avenged by sense that wore with time,” so “The 
Palace of Art” is a picture of the inherent misery| 








~ 


: SIN AS PRIDE AND SELFISHNESS 507 
: 


of selfishness. There the soul that has built for itself 
_a lordly pleasure-house, looks down with contempt upon 
"the poor: 
; O Godlike isolation which art mine! 
: I can but count thee perfect gain, 


What time I watch the darkening droves of swine 
That range on yonder plain. 


. 


In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin, 
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep, 
And oft some brainless devil enters in 
And drives them to the deep. 


| This palace of pride is adorned with beauty, but the 
_ pleasures sought within are not pleasures of the senses. 
| Science, literature, and art are the soul’s ministers, 
_ Everything is here to give enjoyment, except humility 
_ and love. : 

: Full oft the riddle of the painful earth 

| Flash’d through her as she sat alone, 


Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth, 
And intellectual throne. 











And so she throve and prosper’d : so three years 
She prosper’d : on the fourth she fell, 

Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears, 
Struck through with pangs of hell. 


Despair, dread, loathing of her solitude, fell: on her. 
_ Art, sundered from love, had turned the palace into a 
veritable prison. <‘Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame,” 


she 
Lay there exiled from eternal God, 


Lost to her place and name; 


And death and life she hated equally, 
And nothing saw, for her despair, 





508 POETRY INTERPRETS. THE DIVINE ORDER 


But dreadful time, dreadful eternity, 
No comfort anywhere. 

She howl'd aloud, ‘‘I am on fire within. 
There comes no murmur of reply. 

What is it that will take away my sin, 
And save me, lest I die?’’ 


So, when four years were wholly finished, 
She threw her royal robes away, 
‘¢Make me a cottage in the vale,’’ she said, 
«‘Where I may mourn and pray. 


‘*Yet pull not down my palace-towers, that are 
So lightly, beautifully built : | 
Perchance I may return with others there, 
When I have purged my guilt.’’ 








The remorse of a soul awakened by conscience, and | 
“plagued by God with sore despair,’ has never been 
more vividly described. The conviction that sin must. 
be taken away, that guilt must be purged, that the sin- 
ner must depend upon help from without, that one 
must come and “save it, lest it die’—all this is the 
voice of human nature itself, under the teachings of | 
Scripture and of the Holy Spirit. And Tennyson 
recognizes the universal need of this deliverance, for in | 
“Becket «he saya. 


We are sinners all, | 
The best of all not all prepared to die. | 





In “The. Promise of May” this sin is described as | 
hereditary : i 
O this mortal house I 

Which we are born into, is haunted by \ 

The ghosts of the dead passions of dead men ; | 





CHRIST RECOGNIZED AS DIVINE REDEEMER 509 


And these take flesh again with our own flesh, 
And bring us to confusion. 


He was only 

A poor philosopher who called the mind 

Of children a blank page, a ¢abula rasa. 

There, there, is written in invisible inks, 
‘‘Lust, Prodigality, Covetousness, Craft, 

Cowardice, Murder’’—and the heat and fire 

Of life will bring them out, and black enough 

So the child grow to manhood. 





Evil heredity,. however, has not extinguished human 
freedom. We have still a will that can act down upon 
our natures and can modify them. We are responsible 
for the evil, and we can alter our destiny : 


Follow Light, and do the Right—for man can half control his 


doom— 
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb. 


For man is man, and master of his fate. 


With all these abstract possibilities of good, it still re- 
mains true that man is weak, and that for his complete 
renovation he is dependent upon a higher power. In 
“Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” the poet says of 
earth in general what is equally true of the individual 
man : 


Ere she gain her heavenly best, a God must mingle with the game. 





Does Tennyson recognize Christ as the divine Re- 
deemer? I am glad to find abundant evidence of this. 
Doubtful as he is about nature as a direct revelation of 
God, he has no doubt as to the divinity of Christ, or as 
to Christ’s proclamation of God’s mind and will to men. 


510 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


“In Memoriam” teaches this not only in its noble 
initial invocation, 


Strong Son of God, immortal Love! 





but in the subsequent attribution to him of creative, 
power, of supreme authority, and of infinite wisdom, 
Christ is the Maker, the Lord, and the Light, of men,, 
It is the larger Christ, the eternal Revealer of God, to 
whom the poet makes the sublime ascription : | 


Thou seemest human and divine, 
The highest, holiest manhood thou : 
Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 


Our little systems have their day ; 
They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 





And yet this Light of the world, this eternal power 
and truth and love, became incarnate, so that all men 
might recognize and adore a present God: 


For wisdom dealt with mortal powers, 
Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
When truth embodied in a tale 

Shall enter in at lowly doors. 


And so the word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 

More strong than all poetic thought. 








In “The Holy Grail,’ the hermit tells Percivale that : 
the model of all earthly excellence is to be found in chee i 
humility of Christ, 


et 





CHRIST RECOGNIZED AS DIVINE REDEEMER Sit 


, when the Lord of all things 
" Made himself naked of glory for his mortal change. 

















_ The Model of humanity does not stand at a distance 
commanding us to be like him,—he enters into us and 
remodels us. Not imitation of him, so much as appro- 
priation of him, is needed. Immortal Love becomes 
our Lord and King, by diffusing through our being his 
own loving spirit. Christ is “the Life indeed.” He 
raised Lazarus from the dead; he receives the souls of 
the departed; he is an object of prayer to-day. And 
in allusion to Paul’s words, “That rock was Christ,” 
and “Christ liveth in me,” the poet prays that God in 
Christ may pervade and purify us : 


O living will that shalt endure 
When all that seems shalt suffer shock, 
Rise in the spiritual rock, 

Flow through our deeds and make them pure, 


That we may lift from out the dust 
A voice as unto him that hears, 
A cry above the conquer’d years, 
To one that with us works, and trust, 


With faith that comes of self-control, 
The truths that never can be proved, 
Until we close with all we loved, 

And all we flow from, soul in soul. 


Because Tennyson’s belief in God is combined with 
in agnostic philosophy, Stopford Brooke can say that 
yur poet is more Christian than theist. Though he 
professes to know little about God, he knows much 
bout Christ. When I hear him praying to Christ, I 
im not greatly troubled by his seeming identification of 
Christ with all the good: 


512 POETRY INTERPRETS. THE DIVINE ORDER 


Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see nor name, 







Felt within us as ourselves, the Powers of Good, the Powers of II], | 
Strowing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of the Will, | 


Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine, 
Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine. 


i 


It is rather the identification of the good with Christ, 
their Inspirer and their life. Tennyson has shown us : 
heart, and he has confessed to us his faith, in the “ May: 
Queen,” where the dying girl says of the clergyman: | 


— 


He taught me all the mercy, for he showed me all the sin. 

Now, though my lamp was lighted late, there’s One will let me in, 
Nor would I now be well, mother, again if that could be, 

For my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me. 


| 
| 





The same trust in Christ as a Saviour is shown in 
his pathetic poem entitled “In the Children’s Hos-), 
pital.” There the little child who has prayed to Jesus 
to help her in prospect of a surgical operation, and has} 
put her arms outside the bed so that he may distinguish} 
her from the other patients, has her prayer answered. 
The hard-hearted skeptical surgeon 


Had brought his ghastly tools : we believed her asleep again— 
Her dear, long, lean, little arms lying out on the counterpane ; ~ H 
Say that his day is done? Ah, why should we care what they say e 
The Lord of the children had heard her, and Emmie had past} 

away. | 


Tennyson perceives that God’s work for man | 
be met and appropriated by man’s work for God. In 
theological parlance, regeneration must be accompanied) 
by conversion, and there is no conversion without re-| 
pentance and faith. In “ Maud,” even an earthly love 


| 











GOD'S WORK COMPLEMENTED BY MAN’S 513 


las power to humble a man and to make him long to 
re more worthy of the object of his affection: 


And ah for a man to arise in me, 
That the man I am may cease to be. 


ind in “Guinevere” we see the forgiving love of 
irthur for his faithless Queen result in her true repent- 
nce and in the awaking at last of responsive love for 
im whom she had so greatly wronged. The King’s 
yrgiveness comes first: 


Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
Forgives : do thou for thine own soul the rest. 


Let no man dream but that I love thee still. 
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul, 

And so thou lean on our fair father Christ, 
Hereafter in that world where all are pure 

We two may meet before high God, and thou 
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know 
I am thine husband—not a smaller soul, 

Nor Lancelot, nor another. 


it Guinevere’s repentance follows : 


Now I see thee what thou art, 
Thou art the highest and most human too, 
‘Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none 
Will tell the King I love him, though so late? 
Now—ere he goes to the great battle? none: 
Myself must tell him in that purer life, 
But now it were too daring. Ah, my God, 
What might I not have made of thy fair world, 
Had I but loved thy highest creature here ? 


It was my duty to have loved the highest : 
211 


514. POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


It surely was my profit, had I known : 

It would have been my pleasure, had I seen. 
We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
Not Lancelot, nor another. 













There is a defect in this representation, in spite r) 
its heart-moving pathos. Not enough stress is laid 
upon the necessity of a divine influence to enable us t 
see and love the highest. That divine influence accom 
panied and spoke through Arthur’s forgiveness, or th 
guilty passion of the Queen would not have been re 
placed by contrition. I find a disproportionate stres 
laid upon the merely human agencies, and too littl 
stress laid upon the direct operation of the divine Spirit 
Hence, in his outlook for the world’s future, Tennyso1 
has only hope of a consummation that is far away. H 
does not see that God can cut short his work in right 
eousness, and do what commonly takes a thousand year} 
in one day. The naturalistic method of modern scienc} 
has almost banished from his mind the conviction thaj 
Nature and History are plastic in the divine hands, ani 
that the things which are impossible with men are pos 
sible with God. 


| 


more of individual progress to old age, than to th) 


Spirit of God: | 


Done for thee? starved the wild beast that was linked with the) 
eighty years back. i 
Less weight now for the ladder-of-heaven that hangs on a star. i 


If my body come from brutes, though somewhat finer than thei! 

own, é 

I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice bj, 
mute ? 





FOURTH PERIOD OF GROWING DESPONDENCY 515 


No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, 
Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy Province of the 
brute. 


I have climb’d to the snows of Age, and I gaze ata field in the 
Past, 
Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low 
| desire, 
But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last 
As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a 
height that is higher. 















And while the poet expects the future triumph of good 
in this world of ours, he hardly hopes that the ghost of 
the brute will be laid for a million years to come: 


Forward then, but still remember how the course of time will 
swerve, 


Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve. 


Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past, 
{ that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at 
the last. 


These last quotations are from the poems of Tenny- 
son’s old age. They breathe a more unhopeful tone 
than the productions of his earlier manhood. The 
strong faith with which “In Memoriam” closes is 
somewhat weakened. We may indeed speak of a fourth 
veriod of Tennyson's productive activity, and may call 
t the period of growing despondency. Evolution has 
tome to seem the exclusive method of God, though it 
tas not taken the place of God. The poet’s hold upon 
he personal Love at the heart of the Universe is re- 
axed. Let us believe it to be merely the decay of 
tatural cheerfulness and the growth of egotistic petu- 


516 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


lance, rather than a renunciation of the faith of his | 
youth. “Locksley Hall” has in it more of truth than 
“Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” for in the former | 
faith indignantly represses doubt : | 





Fool, again the dream, the fancy? But I know my words are | 
wild, 
For I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. 


Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. 
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, | 
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of | 
change. 


Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day: 
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. 





I believe that these verses have in them not only | 
more of truth, but also more of Tennyson’s own faith, 
than the poems of his later years. ; Yet it is delightful | 
to find that his last poem expresses anew the confidence | 
of his youth. It is the poet’s personal version of | 
Stephen’s prayer, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my) 
spirit”: | 





Sunset and evening star, 
And one clear call for me ! 

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea, 


But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep | 
Turns again home. » | 





Twilight and evening bell, 
And after that the dark! 


’ 





FOURTH PERIOD OF GROWING DESPONDENCY 517 


And may there be no sadness of farewell, 
When I embark ; 


For though from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar. 


And what about the future destiny of men? Will 
all attain to blessedness? We find two methods of 
representation in Tennyson. When he contemplates 
the freedom of the human will and the possibilities of 
its self-perversion, he declares that 


he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be 
Shut out from Love. 


How solemn isthe song of the little maid in “ Guinevere”: 


Late, late, so late! and dark the night, and chill! 
Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. 
Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. 


No light had we: for that we do repent ; 
And learning this, the bridegroom will relent. 
Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. 


No light : so late! and dark and chill the night! 
O let us in, that we may find the light! 
Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. 


Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet ? 
O let us in, though late, to kiss his feet! 
Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. 


“The Vision of Sin” closes with almost equally solemn 
words: | 

At last I heard a voice upon the slope, 

Cry to the summit, ‘‘Is there any hope?’ 





518 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


To which an answer pealed from that high land, 
But in a tongue no man could understand ; 

And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 
God made himself an awful rose of dawn. 


But when the poet considers the majesty of the divine 
order, he cannot believe that any human soul will fail of 
accomplishing the design of its creation: 


re The wish that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have 


The likest God within the soul ? 





He trusts that in some way God will subdue all things 
to himself. The order of the divine administration will 
be vindicated, though the perversity of the human will | | 
seems almost insuperable: 





Behold, we know not anything , 
I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last—far off—at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring. 


“Despair,”’ one of his latest poems, is a travesty of 
the orthodox doctrines of the decrees of God, and of | 
the fixity of self-determined character. The decrees | 
are so described as to be not permissive, but mandatory, | 
and punishment is made to consist in external inflictions, 
rather than in the natural results of transgression. If | 
this poem reflects Tennyson’s final opinions, it indicates 
that calm and candid judgment of the facts of human 
sin and destiny had given place to arbitrary and unrea- 
soning assumption. I prefer to believe that this poem | 
is intended not as an exposition of the author’s own be: | 


SUMMING UP OF TENNYSON’S THEOLOGY 519 


liefs, but as a dramatic picture of the possible results of 
_a materialistic and fatalistic interpretation of the scrip- 
tural utterances with regard to future punishment. 
Tennyson, however, was, without much doubt, a res- 
_torationist. He was obliged to confess, at least in his 
earlier poems, that the ultimate blessedness of all was 
not susceptible of proof, and that there was much to 
contradict it. His evolutionism seemed inconsistent 
with such a conclusion. Of fifty seeds, nature often 
brings but one to bear. May there not be a similar sur- 
vival of the fittest in the moral realm? If he had car- 
ried his evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusion, 
would he not have been obliged to grant that abuse of 
freedom may result in reversion to the brute, annihila- 
tion of manhood but not of existence, punishment from 
within but not from without, eternal penalty in the 
shape of eternal loss ? And would not this have fitted in 
with the observed results of sin here, better than his own 
restorationism? Tennyson feels the difficulties of his 
own position, and in “In Memoriam” he confesses: 


I falter where I firmly trod, 
And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness unto God, 


I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 


We may sum up our view of Tennyson’s theology by 
saying that he is, first and foremost, a believer in the 
divine order of the universe in spite of all the confu- 





520 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


sion incident to human sin; that he regards man as an | 
emanation from God, yet for that very reason respon: | 
sible and free; that he worships Christ as the mani- | 
fested God who has become incarnate to take man’s sin | 
away ; that nature is but the symbol and partial expres. | 
sion of God, while Christ is the divine Word, intelligible | 
and complete ; that God’s method, both in nature and in | 
grace, is that of evolution, though the process admits | 
the hearing and the answering of prayer and the com- | 
munion of the finite spirit with its infinite Creator ; that | 
the Christ of God is imparting himself to human hearts | 
and is displacing the brute inheritance by the power of | 
love ; that this love in man, being derived from God and 
connecting the soul with God, is immortal ; and that the | 
persistence of love is the rational ground for confidence 
in the ultimate triumph of good in the universe. | 
Our poet is so much of a believer that it becomes an 
interesting question why faith did not quell his doubts | 
altogether and rise to the heights of unwavering assur- | 
ance. So it did not; for the struggle with doubt not | 
only did not cease, but even grew more severe, with-ad- | 
vancing age. He had a mind wonderfully open to all 
the voices of his time. Its science and its philosophy | 
deeply impressed him. They claimed to be the only | 
sources of real knowledge. Tennyson almost took them 
at their word. And though his works are full of virtual 
quotations from Scripture, and he speaks of | 





The comfort clasped in truth revealed, 


he seems to have trusted the Bible only when he could 
find some evidence in nature to corroborate it. Into 
the higher joys and certitudes of the spiritual life he 








SUMMING UP OF TENNYSON’S THEOLOGY 521 


entered at times; but he was not native to that air, and 
the most of his life was passed in the valley of the 
shadow. 

It is easy to say that Tennyson might have been a 
more strenuous believer; but when we review the list 
of his actual beliefs, and remember through what stress 
and storm of doubt and conflict they were achieved, we 
may well be thankful for what he was, rather than com- 
plain of what he was not. His very sensitiveness to 
every form of doubt has made him the confidant and 
guide of many who would never have trusted a dog- 
matist. He has led a multitude out of their darkness 
into the light, and he has done this not so much by ar- 
gument as by appealing to something higher than the 
merely logical understanding, namely, to the instincts of 
the heart, or, to speak more precisely, to the reason as 
conditioned and enlightened by pure affection. 

Edgar Allan Poe declared that he regarded Tenny- 
son as the greatest poet that ever lived. He is cer- 
tainly the greatest poet of our century. We may put 
him next to Milton, if not side by side with Milton and 
only lower than Shakespeare. He is a master of liter- 
ary workmanship. His art, at least in all the produc- 
tions of his prime, is almost never-failing. His songs 
_ have a liquid melody equal to that of Shelley, and far 
more informed with genuine emotion. No song of our 
greatest dramatist in our judgment surpasses the “ Bugle- 
song’ in “ The Princess”: 


The splendor falls on castle walls, 
And snowy summits old in story ; _ 
The long light shakes across the lakes, 
And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 


522 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. 


O hark, O hear ! how thin and clear, 
And thinner, clearer, farther going ! 
O sweet and far from cliff and scar 
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! 
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying : 
Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. 


O love, they die in yon rich sky, 
They faint on hill or field or river : 
Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
And grow forever and forever. 
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. 


Stedman, in his “Victorian Poets,” has said that 
there is more of English landscape in one stanza of 
‘In Memoriam”’ than in all of Thomson’s “Seasons.” 
I would add that there is more of heart in one such 
stanza than in all the poetry of Lord Byron. Tennyson 
touches us at deeper depths than any other poet of our 
generation, simply because he has a larger view of 
human nature, and a soul that itself has profounder 
emotions. The yearning of human love, and the sense 
of the Infinite, go together in him. It is because he is 
a religious poet, that he is the most representative poet 
of our time. Whatever may be said to the contrary by 
shallow unbelievers, our time is a time, not of growing 
unbelief, but of growing faith, and the poets who have 
greatest influence and a clear title to immortality are 
those who deal most with that which is immortal in 
man. 

And this is only to say that without love to man and — 





IHE GREATEST POETRY THEOLOGICAL 523 


love to God the greatest poetry is impossible. Mere 
human love is not enough to stir the deepest chords 
either in the poet or in his readers. It is the connection 
of human love with the divine love that gives it per- 
manence and security. The suggestion of the Infinite 
is the secret of all sublimity and beauty. The poet 
need not be a conscious theologian, much less can he be 
chiefly a dogmatist, but he must be deeply impressed 
with the problems of theology and must have his own 
solutions of them, if he is to move his age or to influ- 
ence it for good. It is because Tennyson has seen the 
relation of nature and of man to the ineffable and 
eternal order, that he has commanded the affection and 
reverence of the world. He has done much to hasten 
the victory of the divine goodness and to bring men 
under the dominion of the divine love. 

It was a tribute to the power of poetry, as one of 
God’s chief ministers for the teaching and uplifting of 
the race, that there gathered in Westminster Abbey, on 
the 12th of October, 1892, a most notable company of 
representatives of the English-speaking race, to do the 
last honors to the mortal remains of Alfred Tennyson. 
He was the Poet-Laureate of Great Britain, and he had 
been made a peer of the realm. The universal outburst 
of sorrow that followed the death of the old man of 
eighty-three, was fitly reflected in the crowds that lined 
the streets through which the funeral procession passed, 
and that filled every nook and corner of England’s 
randest mausoleum. The greatest of recent poets was 
buried in the Poets’ Corner, among the singers whose 
names have become immortal. Tennyson's funeral 
proved that the “pen is mightier than the sword,” and 










524 POETRY INTERPRETS THE DIVINE ORDER 


the closing lines of his great “Ode on the Death of the 
Duke of Wellington”’ apply to him also: 


Peace, his triumph will be sung 
By some yet unmolded tongue 
Far on in summers that we shall not see. 


For though the giant ages heave the hill 

And break the shore, and evermore 

Make and break, and work their will ; 
Though world on world in myriad myriads roll 
Round us, each with different powers 

And other forms of life than ours, 

What know we greater than the soul? 

On God and Godlike men we build our trust. 





Hush, the dead march wails in the people's ears : 
The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears ; 
The black earth yawns : the mortal disappears ; 
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; 

He is gone who seemed so great. 

Gone ; but nothing can bereave him 

Of the force he made his own 

Being here, and we believe him 

Something far advanced in state, 

And that he wears a truer crown 

Than any wreath that man can weave him. 

Speak no more of his renown, 

Lay your earthly fancies down, 

And in the vast cathedral: leave him, 

God accept him, Christ receive him. 


GENERAL INDEX 





Abou Symbel, Greek inscription there, 
Die 

“Absalom and Achitophel,”’ 168. 

* Abt Vogler,”’ 444. 

“ Adonais,’’ 416, 473, 493. 

“ All’s Well That Ends Well,” 182, 195. 

Anachronism, legitimate in poetry, 
167. 

“* Andrea del Sarto,’’ 384. 

Antiquity, not uncritical, 5. 

“‘ Antony and Cleopatra,’’ 175, 181, 195. 

Aquinas, “‘ Summa” of, 111. 

“ Arabian Nights, Recollections of,” 
460. 

Archilochus, and the scytale, 23. 

Aristotle, 17, 111, 163. 

“As You Like It,’”’ 182. 

“ Asolando,’’ 443. 

Atonement, in Homer, 50. 

Augustine, 337. 

Authorship of ‘‘Iliad’’ and ‘‘Odys- 
sey’: evidences of, 7-18; not incon- 
sistent with variations of style and 
spirit, 12. 


Bacon, Francis, 173, 174, 420. 

“ Balaustion’s Adventure,’’ 429. 

“ Balin and Balan,”’’ 504. 

Barrett, Elizabeth, 378, 408. 

Bath-Kol, 366. 

/Beatrice, 109, 111, 116, 121, 145, 148. 

“‘Becket,’’ 482, 508. 

Befreier, Der, epithet 
Goethe, 329. 

‘‘ Bishop Blougram’s Apology,”’ 382. 

‘“* Blackwood’s Magazine,”’ 460. 

‘“‘ Break, Break, Break,”’ 501. 

“Bringing the Good News 
Ghent,’’ 382. 

Browning, Robert: his poetry and his 
theology, 375-447 ; occasion of essay 
upon, 373-377; his portrait, 376; his 
life till death of his wife, 377, 378; 





desired by 


from 


his notoriety, 378; his range, 381- 
384; his “‘ Ring and the Book,” 384- 
387; possesses the faculty of ideal- 
ization, 387-397; is he serious? 397, 
398; are his writings healthful? 398- 
400; as a literary artist, 400-412; his 
optimism, 413-431; is an evolution- 
ist, 418-421; believes in God, 421, 
422; is a monist, 422-425; sees God 
revealed in human personality, 425- 
427; sees love of God in Christ, 427- 
431; in a later aspect, 431-444; in- 
fluence of his wife’s death, 445; has 
hopes for the bad, 446; his own 
prospect, 446. 

Brutes: have percepts, 161; have some 
imagination, 161. 

Byron, 335, 379, 458, 522. 


Carlyle, Thomas, 13, 154, 291, 322, 376, 
415. 

‘‘Charge of the Heavy Brigade,’’ 495. 

‘Charge of the Light Brigade,”’ 473. 

Chorizontes, 5. 

Christ: according to Goethe, 320, 321; 
Browning’s estimate of, 427 ; Lamb’s 
estimate of, 428; nature as the body 

_ of, 428; nature as the face of, 428, 
429, 

‘Christmas Eve,”’ 422, 424, 439, 442. 

Christianity : Goethe’s estimate of, 321, 
322; unconscious plagiarisms from, 
369. 

Coleridge: on ‘ Withstanding,’’ 254 ; 
on the “ Prelude,’’ 339; his ‘‘ Kolian 
Harp,’’ 350; relations of, with Words- 
worth, 351, 352; on an illusion of 
memory, 354. 

‘““Comedy, The Divine’’: the monu- 
ment of Beatrice, 111; Dante’s pre- 
paredness for writing, 111-114; the 
intention of, 114-121; the poem de- 
scribed, 121-150; its cosmology, 122, 


525 


526 


123 ; its title explained, 124, 125; its 
terza rima, 125, 126; the Inferno de- 
scribed, 126-136; the Purgatorio de- 
scribed, 136-144; the Paradiso de- 
seribed, 144-150; conclusion of, 151- 
154. 

““Comus,’’ 227. 

‘* Confessions,’’ 383. 

Conscience: in Shakespeare’s works, 
203, 204; a witness against panthe- 
ism, 367. 

““Coriolanus,’’ 181, 197, 199. 

‘Courtship, Lady Geraldine’s,’’ 408. 

Critical theory of the Homeric poems : 
its supporters, 5, 6; its opponents, 6, 
7; reviewed, 7-13. 

Cross, the, Goethe’s view of, 322. 

Curtis, G. W., on a change in his style, 


eed? 2a. 


‘* Cymbeline,”’ 1%; 182, 202, 21 


Dante and ‘The Divine Comedy”: 
considered, 105-155 ; how essay origi- 
nated, 107, 108. 

Dante Alighieri: the time of his birth, 
108, 109; relations to Beatrice, 109- 
111; how qualified to be author of 
“The Divine Comedy,” 111-114 ; his 
aim in his great work, 114-121; his 
scheme of the universe, 122-124; as 
a versifier, 124, 126; his ‘‘Comedy ”’ 
described, 126-149; the most sensi- 
tive of poets, 150; his ruling concep- 
tion of heaven, 151, 152; his view of 
saintship, 152-154; an intense realist, 
154; the voice of all centuries, 154, 
155; why his work will endure, 155. 

“Daughter of the Voice, The,” phrase 
explained, 366. 

Dead, The, in Homer, 56. 

“Death in the Desert, A,’’ 395, 431, 438. 

“Death of the Duke of Wellington, 
Ode on,’’ 473. 

Deism: Upton upon, 837; isolates, 337; 
robs man, 337; makes nature a ma- 
chine, 337; separates man and na- 
ture, 337; in England, 415. 

Descartes, his “ Treatise on Method,” 
339. 

“ Despair,”? Tennyson’s, criticised, 518. 

Dewey, on creative imagination as evi- 
dence of unity of universe, 220. 


GENERAL INDEX 











| 


' Epigraphy: Greek, 


‘‘Doloneia,”’ The, its place in “Iliad,” | 
15. 

“ Dora,’’ 458. 

Dowden, on Shakespeare’s productive 
life, 177. 

Dramatic literature: its genesis, 33; 
its characteristics, 164; Greek and | 
modern, 165. 

‘* Duchess, My Last,’ 382 

“Duty, Ode to”: its place among | 
Wordsworth’s poems, 366; its style, 
366; not pantheistic, 366; its teach 
ings, 367. 





‘Easter Day,’’ 442, 

“* Eclogues,”’ 68. | 

Edwards, Jonathan: his views of | 
heaven and hell, 134, 135; his “ His- 
tory of Redemption,”’ 246, 

Eliot, George: her double piots, 167; 
scepticism in her works, 209; knows 
the evangelical system, 292; exag- 
gerates heredity, 391; on Tennyson’s 
plays, 483. 

Emerson: on Goethe’s “Elective Af- 
finities,” 296; on universality of 
beauty, 338 ; on duty and ability, 390. 

English tongue: influence of Bible on, 
125; in Shakespeare’s time, 172; Ba-— 
con on, 173. 

Ennius; as predecessor of Virgil, 745 
deficient in art, 74; his ‘“ Annals,” — 
74; Virgil’s use of, 76. 

Epic, the: appeals to wonder, 10; a_ 
kind of story-telling, 32; its con- 
genial conditions, 82; a recreation, MY 
35. 





21-23; Latin, 24 
Hebrew, 24; Egyptian, 24; Baby- 
lonian, 24, 25. 

*‘ Epilogue, The,’’ Browning’s, 393. 

‘“Epilogue to Dramatis Persone,’ 
Browning’s, 428. 

‘* Evelyn Hope,’’ 384. 

Evil: its place in descriptive litera- 


Sgr 


ture, 389; its source, 435; good in, 
435. 
Evolution: according to Browning, 
418; a criticism on, 514. i 
Ewig-weibliche, das, discussed, 320. ; 
“Excursion, The”: its length, 339; 
its place in poet’s plan, 339. 








GENERAL 


Falstaff, his deathbed, 210. 

Fate, in Homer, 39. 

“Faust’’: its place among poet’s 
works, 315; its features, 315-317 ; first 
part of, 317 ; second part of, 318-320; a 
criticism on second part of, 324, 325. 

‘‘Ferishtah’s Fancies,’’ 394, 397, 405, 
434, 443. 

Fichte, 338. 

‘ Fireside, By the,” of Browning, 384. 

“Flight of the Duchess, The,’’ Brown- 

_ ing’s, 384, 408. 

Flint, on subjective tendency to pan- 
theism, 198. 
“Francis Turini,’?’ Browning’s, 438. 
Future life, Homer’s views of, 55-59. 


* Georgics,’”’ 79-81. 

**Giaour, The,’’ 380. 

Gladstone, on Homeric question, 7. 

God: as presented in Homer, 42, 53, 54; 
his immanence, 337. 

Gods of Homer; characteristics of, 37, 
88; inconsistently delineated, 38; 
why unmoral, 46. 

Goethe: on Homeric authorship, 6; his 
references to his own poems, 19; a 
dictum of, 129; ‘‘The Poet of Pan- 
theism,’’ 279-331; compared with 
Luther, 281; parentage of, 283, 284; 
characteristics of, 284-286; his habit 
of falling in love, 287; his treatment 
of his mother, 288; affair of, with 
Frederike Brion, 288; writes the 
“Roman Elegies,’’ 288 ; concubinage 
of, 289, 304, 305; his treatment of 
Kestner, 289; unpatriotic, 290; self- 
confident, 290; letter of, to Lavater, 
291; influence on, of Fratilein von 
Klettenberg, 292, 293; his ‘‘ Confes- 
sions of a Beautiful Soul,’ 292; with- 
draws from religious services, 294; 
his ‘‘Generalbeichte,’’ 294; his ‘ hea- 
thenism,’’ 295, 296; his Spinozism, 
296, 297 ; does not know true God, 298 ; 
the character of his philosophy, 298, 
299; his religion of health and joy, 
300; some truth in his philosophy, 
300; an evolutionist, 301; loses hold 
on ethical distinctions, 301; old age 
of, 301, 305; his view of sin and re- 
pentance, 302; Tennyson’s estimate 








INDEX 527 
of, 302, 331; life of, at Weimar, 302, 
303; spending a year in Italy, 304; 
connection of, with Frau von Stein, 
303, 304; bereavements of, 306 ; moral 
sense of, quickened, 306; reply of, 
to Augusta von Stolberg, 306; letter 
to Zelter, 307; his offer of marriage 
declined, 307; visited by Thackeray, 
307; death, 307; his ‘‘ Goetz von Ber- 
lichingen,’’ and criticisms thereof, 
308; his ‘‘ Sorrows of Werther,” 309; 
the second period of his literary life, 
311-315; third period of his literary 
life, 315; composes ‘‘ Faust,’’ 315, 316- 
320; views of Christ and Christianity, 
321, 322; why influential, 325, 326; 
style of, 326; relation of, to nature, 
326, 327; lyrics of, 327, 328 ; his method 
of using Christian terminology, 320; 
his influence on modern fiction, 328 ; 
how a Befreier, 329; how a political 
liberator of Germany, 330; how an 
enslaver of Fatherland, 330; his defi- 
nition of nature, 364. 

“Goetz von Berlichingen,”’ 308, 309. 

Grail, the Holy, legend of, 478, 480, 510, 
511. 

‘‘Grammarian’s Funeral, The,’’ 444. 

Grote, on composition of ‘‘Tliad ’’? and 
‘‘Odyssey,”’’ 6. 


Hamilton, Sir W., 389, 483. 

Hamlet, 159, 168, 181, 194, 200-206. 

“ Hang-draw-and Quarterly,’’ 460. 

Heavens, the, of Dante, 123. 

Hector, 9, 14, 41, 47. 

Hegel, 298, 416. 

Hegenanism, its need, 392. 

Helen: 41, 48, 60; marries Faust, 318. 

Hell of Dante, 122, 137. 

Hellanicus, a Chorizont, 5. 

“Henry IV.”’: mentioned 180; Part I., 
208, 218; Part II., 176, 198. 

‘Henry V.’’: mention of, 179, 180, 204, 
207, 210. 

“Henry VI.’’: introduced, 178, 180; 
PartI., 198; Part IT., 195, 201, 203-205, 
208, 209; Part III., 189. 

Heredity, limited, 509. 

Hermes, 36, 38, 42. ~ 

Hesiod, 79. 


| Historical plays of Shakespeare, 180. 


528 GENERAL INDEX 


‘‘ Hohenstiel-Schwangau,”’ 419, 421, 422. 
Homer: how estimated, 3,4; Arnold’s 
characterization of, 4; ancient criti- 
cism of, 5; Wolf’s theory regarding, 
5; a host of destructive critics at- 
tack, 6; conservative critics of, 6; 
his claim to works that bear his name 
defended, 7-17 ; how he discloses plot, 
8-10; how he develops plot, 10, 11; 
objections to sole authorship of, 12; 
individual unity of each of the poems 
of, 13-17; what follows denial of 


unity of ?17, 18; various versions of © 


poems of, how explained, 19; was 
there a written language in time 
of, 21-28; proof of unity of, not de- 
pendent on existence of written 
characters, 28-31; public apprecia- 
tive of the works of, 31-33; ideas of, 
about God, 35-44; doctrine of, con- 
cerning sin, 44-49; his doctrine of 
atonement, 50-55 ; hisideas of future 
life, 55-59; exhibits human life, 59- 
62; influence of, 62, 63. 

History and poetry compared, 163, 164. 

Hubris, 199. 

Hutton: on realism, 162; on Goethe’s 
philosophy, 298 ; on Goethe’s lyrics, 
ie 


‘‘Tliad ’’: similar to ‘ Odyssey ” in dis- 
closure and development of plot, 7- 
11; differs from ‘‘ Odyssey,” 12, 13; 
its unity, 13-16. 

“Tdyls of the King’”’: 
their story, 479-481. 

Imagination: its place and function, 


subject of, 477; 


160-163; God’s, 166; needful to sci- 


ence and religion, 169; not fancy, 
212; best poetical definition of, 361. 
Immortality : in Homer, 55; Goethe’s 
mature views of, 306, 307. 
“Intimations of Immortality’: dis- 
cussion on, 353-360; its aim, 353; its 
argument stated, 355; quotations 
from, 356-360. 
‘‘Tphigenia,’’ Goethe’s, 313, 315. 
Isaiah, differing style in, 232. 


James, Henry, 388. 

James First of England, his treatment 
of an Arian, 262. 

Jéftrey, on ‘The Excursion,”’ 370. 











Jesus, was he defective in humor? 397 
Jocularity discussed, 397, 398. ¥ 
Jonson, Ben, 182, 184. Ri 
“ Julius Cesar,” 197, 4 


Kant, 338, 416. ; | 
‘“‘ Karshish,”’ 384, < 
‘Kate, My,” 408. . | 
Klettenberg, Fraiilein von, 292,298, 

Klopstock, referred to, 282. | 





Lachmann, 6. i 
‘*Lady of Tripoli,’’ 408. ail 
Lanier, Sidney, on individual freedom, & 
425. vs) 
‘‘Laus Veneris,” of Swinburne, 176. 
‘‘ Lear, King,”’ 167, 181, 186, 197, 199, 205. ; 
Light, Dante’s vocabulary of, 151. ; 
Limbo, 127. 
** Locksley Hall,’’ 465, 470-472. a 
‘Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After,” 
415, 516. De 
Love: its medizeval classification, 139; _ 
Milton’s, 239; a means of insight, 5 
360; its permanent prominence, 475, 
476. _ 
‘*Lucknow, The Defense of,’’ 473. 
Lucretius, influence of, on Virgil, 75. 
Ludlow Castle, 276, 277 
‘* Lycidas,”’ 478, 492. q 
Lyric poetry, affected by aristocracies, — 
32. ‘ 









Macaulay: memory oi, 30; best point — 
in his essay on “‘ Milton,” 248. o 
“Macbeth”: discussed, 171, 187, 190; 
and “ Richard III.’’ compared, 191; — 
and Lady Macbeth compared, 192, 
193. 
Man: and nature united, 336; the in- 
tegral, 360; explains all that leads ‘ 
up to him, 419. ont 
“* Mariana,” 460. 
Marlowe, 173, 176, 182. 
‘‘Martyr’s Epitaph,”’ 407. 
‘“‘ Mary, Queen,”’ 482, 483. 4 
‘‘Measure for Measure,” 182, 195, 202, 
206, 208. 7 
‘*Memoriam, In”: its nature and aim, — 
473, 474; its supreme value, 475, 476. 


and modern times, 29, 30. 
‘*Memory, Ode to,”’ 452, 453. 


GENERAL INDEX 


** Merchant of Venice,’’ 180, 196. 
‘*Merry Wives of Windsor,” 182. 
“Midsummer Night’s Dream,”’ 168, 217. 
Mill, J. S., 335, 376, 399, 410. 

“‘Miller’s Daughter,’’ 458. 

Milton: general treatment of, 222-277 ; 
influence of Civil War upon, 68; his 
epitaph on Shakespeare, 223, 224; 
elements in his style called “ Mil- 
tonic,” 224; his education, 233, 234; 
his part in the struggle for civil lib- 
erty, 235-239; marriage of, and its 
sequel, 239-242; his blindness, 242- 
246; the sphere introduced into 
by ‘“‘ Paradise Lost,’”’ 246-250 ; its trag- 
edy detailed, 250; reception of the 
work of, by the public, 250-252; his 
“Paradise Regained,’ its inception 
and character, 252, 253; his didacti- 
cism, 258, 254; scientific incorrect- 
ness of and permanent popularity, 
255, 256; his sense of form, 256 ; theo- 
logical tenets of, 257-271; influenced 
by Roger Williams, 271, 272; how 
far tolerant in religion, 272, Diamly 
what regard the poet of Protestant- 
ism, 273-276. 

Monism: of Milton, 263; non-ethical, 
of Spinoza, 298; ethical, of Brown- 
ing, 422-495, 

Monotheism, of Homer, 36. 

“Much Ado about Nothing,” 182. 


“Nativity, Ode on the Morning of 
Christ’s,’’ 68, 260. 

Nature: according to Wordsworth, 
364; according to Goethe, 364; its 
best interpreters, 365; its relation to 
God, 365. 

Nemesis in ‘‘ Richard III.” and “‘ Mac- 

beth,”’ 191, 192: 
“Not-self,” earliest perception of, 
what? 160. 





Oak explains acorn, 419. 

Odysseus, 11, 14, 37, 38, 42, 49, 56, 57, 62. 

“*Odyssey,’’ see “‘ Iliad.’’ 

“One Word More,”’ Browning, 380. 

Optimism : often a matter of temper- 
ament, 414; Christian, 434; Pan- 
theistic, 434. 

Ostracism, 27. 


21 


529 
“Othello,” 181, 201. 


P as a symbol, 138. 

‘Palace of Art, The,” 504, 506-508. 

Pantheism: has no method to restore 
the sapsed, 318; fatal to Art, 325, 

‘* Pantheism, The Higher,’’ 488, 489, 499, 

“Paradise Lost”? and ‘“ Regained,” 
see Milton. 

Paradise, Dante’s: consistent with 
progress, 144; upward gravitation 
in, 145; nota Mohammedan, 151. 

‘** Parleyings, The,’’ 443. 

‘‘ Parsifal,’’ carried in memory, 29. 

Paul, Jean, 392. 

“Pauline,” of Browning, 377. 

Peisistratus, 5, 6, 18, 19, 28. 

Penalty, its essence, 134, 506. 

Pharaoh, hardening his heart, 49. 

Pheenicia, 27. 

‘Pippa Passes,”’’ 392, 431. 

Plato: his view of imagination, 160; 
banishes poets from his Republic, 
160; his theory of pre-existence, 
353 ; Cave of, 368. 

Poet, the: expresses God’s plan of 
the universe, 166; presents the uni- 
versal, 169; Wordsworth upon, 342: 
“a maker,” 879; described by 
Browning, 379; not made by imagi- 
nation alone, 388 ; idealizes, 388; isa 
philosopher, 390; is not a fatalist, 
390; has right views of God, 392; has 
a moral aim, 455. 

“* Poet, The,” of Tennyson, 454, 455, 460. 

Poetry: depends on form, 73; more 
valuable than history, 163, 164; re- 
constructs, 164; as described by 
Milton, 167; and insanity, 168 ; Eng- 
land’s chief glory, 335; defined, 378, 
379; imagination and facts in, 379; 
creative, not a mere reproduction, 
389; has an ideal and religious ele- 
ment, 389-393 ; of the future, 412, 413; 
definition of, 459; essentials to the 
greatest, 523. 

Pope, criticised, 338. 

Portia, excellence of her delineation, 
196. 

Pre-existence of souls, 353-359. 

‘‘ Prelude, The,”’ 338, 339, 361, 362. 

“‘ Primrose of the Rock, The,’’ 359. 


530 

‘« Princess, The,’’ 466-469, 498, 

“* Profundis, De,’’ 485, 486, 489. 

“ Prometheus,”’ 391, 392. 

Propitiation, in Homer, 51. 

Purgatory : difficulty of ascent to, 136 ; 
has an ante-purgatory, 137, 139 ; com- 
pared with hell, 188, 139; classifica- 
tion of sins in, 189; isa process, 142; 
mistakes engendered by teaching 
concerning, 143. 

Puritan theology: tends to Deism, 
337; its mistakes, 415. 


Queensberry, Marquis of, an agnostic, 
503. 


“Rabbi ben Ezra,’’ 424, 442. 

Reason, its largest meaning, 360. 

Religion, is knowledge, 484. 

Reparation, the essence of tragedy, 
391. 

‘Richard III.’’: its plot simple, 188; 
its hero, Shakespeare’s “ villain,’’ 
188, 189; arrival of Nemesis in, 190. 

Rimini, Francesca di, 183. 

“Ring and the Book, The,”’’ 379, 380, 
384, 887, 403, 406, 418, 423, 424, 431, 434, 
436, 442, 446. 

“Root and Branch ’”’ party, 235. 


° 


Sacrifice, the heathen and Christian 
idea of, 52, 54, 55. 

“Sage, The Ancient,’’ 488, 499. 

‘*Saisiaz, La,’’ 438, 448. 

““Samson Agonistes,’’ 240, 241, 243. 

“*Saul,’’ 3938, 394, 395. 

Schiller: on Weimar Society, 303 ; in- 
fluence of, on Goethe, 303 ; his death, 
305, 306. 

Science, what? 162. 

Seneca, ‘‘ De Tranquillitate,’’ 168. 

Shakespeare : his universality, 157- 
220; his largeness, 159, 160; ex- 
pressed what was best of his age, 
171-173 ; is yet a new force, 173, 174 ; 
his education, 174; his adventurous 
youth, 175-177; the period of his 
productive activity divided, 177, 178; 
“in the workshop,” 178; ‘‘in the 
““world,’’ 178-181; ‘“‘out of. the 
depths,’’ 181, 182; ‘‘on the heights,” 
182, 188; his self-forgetfulness, 184; 





GENERAL INDEX 


his concessions to popular taste, 185; _ y 
his universality considered, 186; the _ 
universal element present in his — 
creation of characters, 187-212; isa 
great ethical teacher, 193; his secu- fi 
larity a limitation of his univer- ie 
sality, 194; not agnostic or natural- — 
istic, 195; his view of the divine 
nature, 196; his view of human 
nature, 197-211; his references to | 
work of Christ, 208, 209; his teach- 

ings pure and sound, 210; the uni- 
versal in his imagery, 212-214; the 
universal in his diction, 214-216; his _ 
invention limited, 217; the poet par © 
excellence of secular humanity, 217- — 
220. q 
Shelley, 8, 338, 408, 416, 521. - 


Sin: in Homer, 44-51; Dante’s classi- — | 


fication of, 128-131; Dante’s view of 
nature and penalty of, 132-136; 
Shakespeare’s view of, 198-202; Mil- 
ton’s view of, 265; Goethe’s view of, - 
302; Browning’s view of, 434-439; _ 
Tennyson’s view of, 504-509. { 
Sonnets: of Shakespeare, 184, 185, 476; 
of Milton, 244, 369; of Words- © 
worth, 369. a 
“ Sordello,”’ 402, 416. 
“Sorrows of Werther,’’ 309-311. 
*‘Soul’s Tragedy,’’ 439. 
“Spanish Cloister,’’ 383. 
Spinoza, 297, 298. a 
‘Statue and the Bust, The,’’ 384, 435. 
eeotrafiord,”” 877. 
Substitution, 51. 
Suffering, how explained by Dante, — 
134. ; 
Swinburne, 176, 376, 408, 414, 478, 479. 
Taine, M., 171, 475. ‘ 
Tennyson : 449-524; the promise of his ~ 
youth, 451-458 ; style of, 458-460; earli- 


est publications of, 460, 461; some 


characteristics of, 461-465; applies” 
the principle of divine order, 465-469 ; — 
poet of the pure affections, 469-471 ; 
his mistakes extenuated, 471-473; 


the greatest work of his life, 473-476; 


writes ‘““The Idylls of the King,” 
476-482 ; dramas of, 482, 483; the ag- 
nostic cast of his poems accounted 
for, 483-485 ; inconsistent in use of 





GENERAL INDEX 


the words faith and knowledge, 
485; his views of the derivation of 
the soul, 486-489; not a pantheist, 
489-493 ; believes in no personal ex- 
istence before birth, 493-496 ; his eon- 
ception of nature, 496-502 ; fights ma- 
terialism, 502; recognizes the abuse 
of human freedom, 503; his pictures 
of sin, 504-509 ; recognizes Christ as 
deliverer, 509-514; the despondency 
of his old age, 515-517; his two repre- 
sentations of man’s future destiny, 
517-519 ; theology of, summed up, 519, 
520; a religious guide, 521; wherein 
agreat poet, 521-523; his final hon- 
ors, 523, 524. 

Theology, a popular definition of, 36. 

“Timon of Athens,’’ 200, 201. 

“Tintern Abbey, Lines Written 
Above,” Wordsworth’s completest 
statement of relation between God 
and nature, 360-362. 

“Tintern Abbey,” asystem of thought 
in verse, 363-365. 

“Titus Andronicus,’ 186, 196. 

“Treatise of Christian Doctrine,” Mil- 
ton’s, 257-274. 

“ Troilus and Cressida,”’ 175, 182, 198. 

“ Twelfth Night,’ 197. 

Twyn, his fate, 238. 

Ulysses: referred to, 123; Shakes- 
peare’s portraiture of, 175. 

Universality: key to unlock mystery 
of Shakespeare, 186; its meaning, 
186. 2 

Universe, content of term, 380. 


Vaughan, his metempsychosis, 354. 

“Venus and Adonis,’’ 176, 186. 

Virgil: general treatment of, 65-103 ; 
and Homer, 4; his presentation of 
facts, 8; his age, 67-69; his birth and 
education, 69-73 ; his devotion to the 
Muse, 73-75; his characteristics as a 
writer, 75-77; his writings, 77; his 








531 


“‘Eclogues,’* 77-79; his ‘““Georgics,”’ 
79-81 ; the‘ Hneid,”’ 81-83; his posi- 
tion among ancient poets, 83-875 
some special excellencies of, 87-91; 
is theologically in advance of Ho- 
mer, 91-94 ; a prophet of Christianity, 
94-97 ; send-off of his work, 97 ; in- 
fluences the faiths of his country- 
men, 97, 98; in the estimation of the 
Middle Ages, 98-102; the motive and 
subject of his song, 102; expresses 
the hope of the Augustan Age, 108. 


Voltaire, on purgatory, 138. 


Vulpius, Christiane, 289, 304-306, 


Watson, William, 371, 459. 

Watts, G. F., a collection of his paint- 
ings, 375. 

‘““Where Claribel Low Lieth,” 460. 

‘Wilhelm Meister,’’ 293. 

‘Winter’s Tale,’ 182. 

Wolf, his Homeric theory, 5, 6, 16. 

Wordsworth: in general, 333-372; in- 
fluence of, on Mill, 335, 336; the poet 
of revival and revolution, 336-338 ; 
his “‘ Prelude,”’ 338-341 ; why arustie 
poet, 341; awakes to his vocation, 
342-344; deals with pre-suppositions 
of Christianity, 344-346; his sister 
Dorothy, 346-349; his friend Cole- 
ridge, 349-352; his three greatest 
poems, 352, 353 ; his ‘‘ Intimations of 
Immortality,’ 353-359; not a pan- 
theist, 859, 360; his “Lines Written 
Above Tintern Abbey,” 360-362 ; his 
“Tintern Abbey,’’ 363-365 ; his ‘Ode 
to Duty,’’ 365-368 ; possesses a Chris- 
tian spirit, 368, 369; is a great poet, 
369, 370; tributes to his genius, 370- 
372. 


Xenon, a Chorizont, 5. 


Zeus, 36-42. 
Zola, 162, 388. 














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